LET'S START THE new year right, with a Poetry Week.
Graham may be rounding the turn into her late manner. Overlord, Sea Change, and PLACE, it seemed to me, had Graham in a holding pattern, doing good work but in a familiar vein--Graham-like without being Graham at her exploratory, audacious best.
Fast did seem different, though. Graham was always interested in the immediate and the urgent, but in Fast she seemed interested in immediacy and urgency in a new, stripped-down way. She seemed willing to abandon her usual toolkit.
That willingness continues in Runaway. The five poems with right-side justification, for instance, which I don't recall her using to this extent before.
I do not understand why this relatively simple device has an effect, but it does, and somehow Graham is very deft at it. The tiny skip this technique puts into the rhythm of reading may be the key. Whatever it is, I found going back to re-read these immediately after finishing, trying to see why they were landing as they did, and I'm still not sure.
A larger group uses quatrains with unusually long lines--I wonder if the book's design, with its unusually wide, almost square pages, was a way to keep these long lines all in one line of print. Here too something happens in the rhythm of the reading that feels...different. So even when Graham is doing basically what she has been doing since The End of Beauty--unpacking phenomena, self-correcting, suddenly getting feverish, hallucinatory--her doing it in these long-lined quatrains makes it all register in an unfamiliar, oddly stately way.
And what about the two "Sam" poems, "Sam's Dream" and "Sam's Standing," in ten-line stanzas, the one seeming to be about an embryo, the other about the same embryo once he or she is born? Why the nod to Dylan Thomas's "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"? Why the recasting of Edward Thomas's "As the Team's Head Brass" as though it were filmed by Alain Resnais?
Graham is back at the old cauldron, but she has some new spells.
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