Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_

 A BRAND NEW dedicatee this time around—Samantha Lorraine Almanza. I wondered whether Graham had broken her pattern of dedicating collections only to family members, but several poems in Part III of Runaway led me to think that Samantha Lorraine Almanza must be a granddaughter. “Sam’s Dream” is about Sam in utero and then being born; “Sam’s Standing” is about her learning to walk; “I Won’t Live Long” is about her acquiring language. 

Even when all the news is bad (I can attest) grandchildren give one hope, and the Sam poems have a certain lift and sprightliness that is not Graham’s most familiar vein.

That more familiar vein--unease, anxiety, dread--shows up too. "When Overfull of Pain" is the title and the opening phrase of one of the poems, for instance. "[To] the Last [Be] Human" has the atmosphere of a dystopian or post-eco-disaster novel:

One of us had come back from some other place--

Alaska, a father dying in rage, screaming on his

floor, saved by

nothing.

We're so full of the dead the burnt fronds

hum, getting going each day again into too much sun to no

avail. I was human. I would have liked to speak of

that. But not now. Now is more

complicated. I have no enemy except day. The edges

turn hot and

stay

hot. Shadow hard to find [...]

Later in the poem the collection's title appears: "What are our rates of speed. Where is runaway. How far / away."  Do these questions without question mark hope for an elsewhere not yet visited by the disaster? It is not at all clear that there is one.

The possibility, as a disaster unfolds, of a future or an elsewhere also occurs "The Hiddenness of the World," a re-casting of Edward Thomas's great poem, "As the Team's Head Brass." In Thomas's poem, written as World War I was in its catastrophic course, the speaker engages in an intermittent conversation with a farmer plowing his field behind a team of horses. They talk about the war, naturally. The war is a disaster, but the farmer is still plowing, still intends to plant, still assumes his crop will grow, that people will need food. In the distance, a pair of lovers slips into and then out of a small wood, perhaps conceiving a child who will live in the hard-to-imagine future. 

It's an uncannily balanced poem. Thomas was soon off to war himself, and he was killed. The immense human cost of the war looms just underneath the lines--yet some idea that life will continue is also present.

Graham's poem folds our own eco-catastrophe into this scenario. Can we get out? Is there an elsewhere to get to? Can we even imagine one? "Feel the outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in my head. / You. You in me in this final time."