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"[To] the Last [Be] Human collects four extraordinary poetry books-Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway-by Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. With an introduction by Robert MacFarlane"--
About the author
Jorie Graham is the author of a dozen collections of poetry,
including
The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She
divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she
teaches at Harvard University.
Summary
[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four
extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.
From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:
The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-time
future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But
they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are
very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to
preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when
‘the future / takes shape / too quickly,’ when we are entering ‘a time / beyond
belief.’ They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form….
Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing
language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift
of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ‘whirling robe
humming with firstness,’ there to ‘greet you if you eye-up.’
I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for
presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ‘Wind would be
nice but / it’s only us shaking.’ … To read these four twenty-first-century
books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns
forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within
themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that
joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the
last book:
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening…
Additional text
“Graham is one of our great poets. Her
words will long outlast all of this chatter.” —New York Times
“Every poem, Graham suggests, is part net
and part wind, its finely knotted phrases and lines straining to ‘hold,’ for
longer than an instant, the presence passing through them.” —The New Yorker
“We will always need to read Jorie Graham,
and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last forty years of
poetry in America.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Graham begins her fifth decade of
publishing with a bravura performance that probes the present for what the
future will bring.” —Publishers Weekly
“Graham has long been breaking open the
lyric voice, seeing how much of the vast, fractured, overwhelming present it
can contain. Often she explores a self that won’t hold together but must still
be held accountable—as a political entity, a citizen.” —Harper’s Magazine
“Pulitzer Prize winner Graham’s poems are
like those of John Donne and e.e. cummings but on speed dial. Like Donne,
Graham seeks to encounter the metaphysics of everything.” —Library
Journal
“Graham’s poems act as the sonar devices
of contemporary western consciousness, probing the depths of human existential
experience.” —The Guardian
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