Sea Change: Poems

By Jorie Graham

The New York Times has said that "Jorie Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have," and this new collection is a reminder of how startling, original, and deeply relevant her poetry is. In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of continuing injury and damage done, and the realization that the existence of a "future" itself may no longer be assured?

There is no better writer to confront such crucial matters than Jorie Graham. In addition to her recognized achievements as a poet of philosophical, aesthetic, and moral concerns, Graham has also been acknowledged as "our most formidable nature poet" (Publishers Weekly). As gorgeous and formally inventive as anything she has written, Sea Change is an essential work speaking out for our planet and the world we have known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061873164

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Book preview

I

SEA CHANGE

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than

ever before in the recording

of such. Un-

natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look

down, can

feel it, yes, don’t know

where. Also submerging us,

making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an

unnegotiable

drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing

itself. Also sustained, as in a hatred of

a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one out of

nowhere & makes

one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an

idea. Everything unpreventable and excited like

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future

takes shape

too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving

nothing in the way of

trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life, & it

fussing all over us, like a confinement gone

insane, blurring the feeling of

the state of

being. Which did exist just yesterday, calm and

true. Like the right to

privacy—how strange a feeling, here, the right—

consider your affliction says the

wind, do not plead ignorance, & farther and farther

away leaks the

past, much farther than it used to go, beating against the shutters I

have now fastened again, the huge mis-

understanding round me now so

still in

the center of this room, listening—oh,

these are not split decisions, everything

is in agreement, we set out willingly, & also knew to

play by rules, & if I say to you now

let’s go

somewhere the thought won’t outlast

the minute, here it is now, carrying its North

Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider

the body of the ocean which rises every instant into me, & its

ancient e-

vaporation, & how it delivers itself

to me, how the world is our law, this in drifting of us

into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the

intermingling of us lacks in-

telligence, makes

reverberation, syllables untranscribable, in-clingings, & how wonder is also what

pours from us when, in the

coiling, at the very bottom of

the food

chain, sprung

from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-

dispensable

plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,

spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such

that the hatch will not survive, nor the

species in the end, in the the right-now forever un-

interruptible slowing of the

gulf

stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, am suddenly

aware

of having written my poems, I feel it in

my useless

hands, palms in my lap, & in my listening, & also the memory of a season at its

full, into which is spattered like a

silly cry this in-

cessant leaf-glittering, shadow-mad, all over

the lightshafts, the walls, the bent back ranks of trees all

stippled with these slivers of

light like

breaking grins—infinities of them—wriggling along the walls, over the

grasses—mouths

reaching into

other mouths—sucking out all the

air—huge breaths passing to and fro between the unkind blurrings—& quicken

me further says this new wind, &

according to thy

judgment, &

I am inclining my heart