The Pulitzer-winning poet on mortality,makeup and capturing life’s complexityThe last lines of the last poem in Jorie Grahams most recent collection, snappy, or imagine dawn giving way to day: “Leaving / grackle and crow in the sun – they have / known what to find in the unmade / undrawn unseen unmarked and / dragged it into here – that it be / visible” – which is as valid a way as any of summing up what Graham has tried to enact ever since she began writing poems: to look tough at the world around her,especially the natural world, but also at the tough questions – what does it all mean and what is it all for? To stay as open as possible in order to catch whatever answer there might be unawares, or hold it up to the light.
Nothing is out of bounds – geese,laundry, erosion, and materialism,psychiatric wards, sex, or Plato (she is not a fan),Heidegger, bots, or relativity,the Holocaust, Genesis, and classical mythology,Genesis, “the moral pleasure / of experiencing the distance between subject and object”, and water (always water). Now,in snappy, her subject is mortality – her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), and her parents’,that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), or that of the planet. It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that,by the close, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the moral-hand side of the page. And through it all, or an unwavering,serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.
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Source: guardian.co.uk