Poetry review: Jorie Graham's 'Sea Change'

Alexandra Yurkovsky

Friday, April 25, 2008

Sea Change

By Jorie Graham

Ecco; 56 pages; $23.95

Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard professor, former Iowa Writer's Workshop faculty member: Jorie Graham's status as a canonic poet - of the academic breed, with a flair for blending the intellectual and the sensual - is virtually guaranteed.

Graham's affinities with both nature and literature are authentic. As a result, her use of Shakespeare's "Tempest" to underpin "Sea Change," her 12th book of poems, is no crutch or gimmick. It enables a kind of shorthand or telepathy between reader and poet, as her allusions elicit similar associations in those familiar with the work. Among other benefits, reading "Sea Change" may prod folks to re-read (or read) "The Tempest."

In "Sea Change," Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.

With all the current talk of political change, it is instructive to re-examine that overused phrase, "sea change," which, like many cliches, comes from Shakespeare. Here's Ariel's song:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing in him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell ...

... Ding-dong, bell.

This great change is not simply disintegration by death, but transformation "into something rich and strange." Graham's title poem plays with the notion as she eulogizes the tempest undergone by the planet's waters. History and myth merge, as clipped, urgent statements summarize our ecological illness:

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than

ever before in the recording

of such. Un-

natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body - I look

down, can

feel it, yes, don't know

where. Also submerging us,

making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an

unnegotiable

drama ...

And to "Consider/the body of the ocean which rises every instant into/me" is also to witness sea change. The name of Prospero's daughter, Miranda, is rooted in "wonder," thus resonating with "wonder is also what/pours from us when .../... at the very bottom of/the food/chain, sprung/from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-/dispensable/plankton is forced north now, .../spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such/that the hatch will not survive, nor the/species in the end, in the right-now forever un-/interruptible slowing of the gulf ..."

These flowing and ebbing lines, breaking wave-like at prefixes "un-" and "in-," intermingle breath, speech and sea rhythms until the speaker changes from woman to wind: "& quicken/me further says this new wind, &/according to thy/judgment, &/I am inclining my heart toward the end,/I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself,/wiry furies riding my many backs against your foundations and your/best young/tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill."

Pulled up short though we are by that mundane last line, upon turning the page to "Embodies," we get hammered again with the enormity of our ecological errors: "Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms," and the understatement of "mistake" emanates horror. If they elicit visceral reactions to the ruin of this planet, these poems have done more for Earth than most polemical tirades.

By contrast, "Guantanamo" expresses muted, stilted outrage at political cruelty. Although Graham eschews bumper-sticker rhetoric, her snippets of journalistic prose sound dissonant, and not just because the political situation is nasty. Or maybe there is no aesthetically effective way to address such matters. A waning, creaking moon begins the piece; a narrator, admonished by the moon to lose herself, concludes with this possibly narcissistic response: "In this overflowing of my eye,/I do."

Is this just another example of Graham's egotistic Achilles' heel, or is she purposely arguing that egotism can underlie even (especially) righteous anger? The middle section makes jarring accusations: "& acts being/committed in your name, & your captives arriving/at your detention center, there, in your/ eyes, the lockup, deep in your pupil." By phrase's end, the emphasis has shifted, and our innate subjectivity is exposed as the cause of oppression of "the other." Though it provoked an ambivalent critical response, "Guantanamo" does contains brilliant deadpan lines, with echoes of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot": "We will long to be forgiven. It doesn't matter for what, there are no/facts."

Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in "Sea Change" bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to "fix" global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.

Alexandra Yurkovsky's reviews and poems have appeared in Caveat Lector, Chiron Review, Fish Drum and Euphony. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle