Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (1)

THE ERRANCY IS the first Graham collection to come in at fewer pages than its predecessor--112 pages to Materialism's 146--but the font is smaller in The Errancy, so it may be a wash. More interesting, perhaps, is that it is also the first collection without a dedicatee. The preceding collections had been dedicated, sometimes in various combinations, to Graham's parents, to then-husband Jim Galvin, to daughter Emily, and to, in parentheses, "Marilynne" (Robinson, maybe, but I don't know). But The Errancy bears no dedication.

What to make of an absence is a bottomless question, but I wonder if Graham was feeling alone when the book appeared (1997). She seems alone in a lot of the poems--not just alone, but estranged, removed, even alienated. In the first poem, "The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia," she seems to be looking at a party, but at a kind of remove, as though the party were in her backyard and she were looking out a second-story window: "how small they seem from here, / the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence, / and also the tiny merciless darts / of truth." You've been to parties like that, I suppose--some wine, some nice cheese, a few merciless darts of truth. A few lines earlier, the phrase about "the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn" strikes a similar note of disenchantment.

There are six other "guardian angel" poems. My guess about the guardian angels is that they represent the habits and practices that keep one functioning when circumstances grow stressful. The book as a whole faintly suggests that Graham's marriage was out of fuel and losing altitude during the time she was writing these poems, yet such strategies as the "Guardian Angel of Not Feeling" ("We gust that lingering, moody, raw affection / out, we peck and fret until it's / gone") and the "Guardian Angel of the Private Life" ("sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event / on the list / then checking it off") keep her going even while internal turbulence threatens to throw her into a tailspin.