Overlord: Poems

There is something frantic in Jorie Graham's most recent book, the ominously titled "Overlord". Her poetry has always had a deep sense of urgency and sprawl, but coupled with a political fervor none too quiet in the face of current events and you have a roar of words as heavy as the burden of the past. The posture of the book is bleak and desperate at times because she has taken up into her body humanity and history and we are -if we are anything- creatures of great yearning in the face of emptiness. "The aim is to become/ something broken/ that cannot break further." (Praying (Attempt of Feb 6 `04)). Six of the poems in the book are titled "Praying" (distinguished by dates on which they were "attempted"), but nearly all the poems are prayers, some sort of beseeching beyond the self to god and, at times, to the reader. It is a workbook of remorse and each poem is an exercise in seeing our shame, in calling us to remembrance. "Are we `beyond salvation'? Will you not speak?/ Such a large absence--shall it not compel the largest presence?/ Can we not break the wall?/ And can it please not be a mirror lord?" (Little Exercise). This intertwining of prayers and politics is no ironic juxtaposition but a carefully reasoned connection between beliefs and wars. The book's opening quotes are enough to carry the argument, "Belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light." by Franz Kafka and the most chilling of all, from Leo Tolstoy, "Before a war breaks out, it has long begun in the hearts of the people." It is an amazing book and a far more beautiful and sensible response than the pablum that is "Poets Against the War".

I read The End of Beauty when it came out years ago and dismissed Jorie Graham as an over-educated obscurantist. Then, a couple of months ago I came across one of the poems from this book in The New Yorker, and completely changed my mind. I LOVE this book, have read it over and over again. The way she has layered 1945 on 2003 is heartbreaking on so many levels. The absolutely personal and the historical are intertwined so so beautifully in this work. here's a small dose, so you can listen to her instead of me: The dying mother in the waiting room with me is talking with her daughter. She won't be here ever again soon. They have a brochure spread out between them, a training program, involves some travel, can't see really what it is. This, says the young girl, pointing, this, mom, this part here is the part I'm excited about. or this: from Omaha These are the givens: poverty, greed, un- expectedness. The bubble of the now being emitting from the blossoming then. That's all. Maybe disappearance--as of the moon to the horror of the men already in dark. And always the one, far away, sitting charred and absent- minded, on his throne. And always an audience for all this slaughter and laughter-- "later on." The last few decades at any given moment a leaf that drops. Some twig left bare. The change upon us. But the fall--the falling of it even after it's done--the fall: continues. Because there is no way to get the killing to end. I hear a lot of Rilke in Jorie Graham, a sense of suppressed exhortation, real wisdom coming from a very broken place... using that voice to speak about warfare and power and history and politics is very compelling.

Often attacked for her headstrong ways andbecause, to be frank about it, she is a woman, Jorie Graham is triumphing over her current, well-publicized difficulties with a collection that adds new shadows and depths to what is already a distinctive voice and allusive, almost invsible storytelling. She has hit on the idea, the trope, of OVERLORD and managed to succeed at an unlikely target, a combination of historical detail like Stephen Ambrose, with her trademark exploration of consciousness, and a new attention to her long, long line which often reads as though thought itself was being examined and twisted along a wire, like a centipede on a tightrope, high above a crowd all of whose mouths hang gaping open. Let's look at an example, shall we? In "EUROPE (Omaha Beach 2003)," Graham evokes the famous Norman landings by picking out the appropriate, sometimes surreal, nouns: "Boats, sirf, cries, miles, pool, bars, war." It is vivid, like the first reels of Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. "No/ container, friend," she adds. "No basic building blocks "of/ matter. No constituent particles from which everything/ is made." Then, quick as a wince, she corrects herself: "No made." (Note the hidden word "nomad" in the middle of this, crouching like a Bedouin.) Perhaps recent events in world history have keft US poets feeling nomadic, as though there were no real place for us any more on American soil, Where would she be without Peter Sacks? He took a lovely photograph of her in Normandy in the very fields through which rthe Allies poured on June 6, 1944, and then again he made some kind of spectral collage for the books cover, random (perhaps?) newsprint torn and remounted, then superimposed with bold, Asian strokes of maroon, white and black paint. The field is yellow, stained with age and water damage, like the shipborne invasion itself. With the double consciousness of a wound, Graham has made an interesting investment in reclaiming a crucial battle of World War II from the Tom Brokaws and the Gerald Fords who have claimed it as their own, and returned it to poetry where it belongs.