SWARM (2000) IS a wider swerve than I realized at the time I first read it, sometime within half a year of when it was published. After my having just read the previous six collections, Swarm comes as a shock. From The End of Beauty on, Graham had been writing in longer lines and even longer sentences, and writing longer poems with longer arcs of development (see especially Materialism), Not in Swarm. For the most part, the lines here are short, sometimes just a few words, and we often get phrases or just isolated words instead of those long unscrolling Grahamian sentences. "The Veil" begins with these lines:
Exile Angle of vision.
So steep the representation.
Desperate Polite.
A fourth wall A sixth act.
Centuries lean up into its weave, shudder, go out.
The poems are not brief, but the longest are only three or four pages, and they tend to have the disjunctive feel of the passage I just quoted, to feel like mosaics from which half the tesserae have fallen out.
There are some new devices as well: poems with what look like stage directions ("The Veil," "Middle Distance,"), more frequent use of parentheses, asterisks separating lines.
Graham had a lot going on in the later 1990s. She took up her position as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (succeeding Seamus Heaney) in 1999, which was the same year her divorce from Jim Galvin became final. In 1999, too, while serving as judge in a poetry contest, she gave the prize to her boyfriend (later husband), Peter Sacks, a dodgy circumstance that was to get a lot of attention a few years later.
The author bio on the back flap of the dust jacket notes that Graham "currently divides her time between Iowa and Massachusetts," which makes me wonder whether her daughter did not want to be the new kid in a Massachusetts school and so stayed in Iowa City. Being often separated from her daughter would be a stressful situation, I imagine--for that matter, a daughter in her early teens and a mother in her late 40s is going to be stressful no matter what, even if no divorces or relocations are involved.
It would be over-tidy to say the radical changes in Graham's personal life generated the radical changes in the form of her poetry, but there does seem to be a movement in Swarm to strip things down, to lay bare the bones. There are sixteen different poems titled "Underneath," distinguished from each other by number or subtitles, as in "Underneath (8)" or "Underneath (Libation)." Are these the poems that were underneath the baroque elaborations of The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism?
Swarm revisits The End of Beauty in an even more remarkable way by including poems on Eurydice, Daphne, and Eve, but this time without Orpheus, Apollo, and Adam. And instead of Penelope, we get Calypso...and Clytemnestra.
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