THIS IS GRAHAM's first new collection with Copper Canyon (who in 2022 re-published her last four books with Ecco as a single volume). I wonder why she changed publishers? I'll probably never know.
The title may mean that the book is set, so to speak, in the future, its landscapes those of a world in which present rates of climate change go unaddressed and we end up in a world of no birds but AI ones (which I think is what "Dusk in Drought" is about). Graham has been writing about this at least since Sea Change (2009), but the flash-forward effect adds an unnerving dimension. Also noticeable is the probing of the relationship between poets and nature, raising questions of what becomes of that relationship as "nature" vanishes.
The date in the title may also carry an implication about Graham's age, as she would be 90 in 2040, and in some poems of Part II the speaker seems to be in a care facility of some kind. Graham has been in this neighborhood before, too, in the cancer patient poems of Fast (2018), a particular favorite of mine among her books. Here, too, the flash-forward lends the familiar a strangeness--we get a Graham we know, but within and around it another Graham.
Imagining herself into a not-too-distant future is a surprising move for Graham, as she has always been a student of the now--the phenomenological now, I mean, the always-opening present moment. There were always memories of the past and anticipations of the future as well, I know, but her characteristic move seemed to be to stay with the present so intensely that it almost broke off from the continuum of time and hovered there, a Grecian urn made to stand still for contemplation by her language. And she is still doing that in this volume--only it's a "now" from some 16 years hence, conjured by her imagination.
I don't want to call it "science fiction poetry," as that sounds just a tad silly, but you could certainly read To 2040 alongside Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future without any sense of incongruence.
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