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"Sea Change" by Jorie Graham
Carcanet £9.95

Since her 1996 Pulitzer Prize winning "The Dream of the Unified Field", what we have come to expect from Graham’s poetry is an exposure of actuality: an absorbing amalgamation of important global issues, embedded in stark formal innovation.

This eleventh collection is no exception. The site of "Sea Change" is the illusive borderland of present and future. A nightmare place where climate change is more than imminent, it is in progress.

My Species is ill
                                   ('The Violinist at the Window, 1918')

The first thing you will notice is Graham’s approach to her theme. These poems follow an enduring form: a collection-long, peripatetic legato to staccato movement, overlaid with a post-symbolist usage of metaphor.

This is a collection of love poems; the natural world is the speaker’s object of desire, and each poem, a love letter to one aspect of the environment:

‘Midwinter.’,‘Full moon.’,‘After great rain.’ and
‘Summer heat.’ etc.

The poems are schematized similarly: how does she love the Midwinter? Graham counts the ways. A poem unfolds itself prosaically; it fondles every detail of the love object: "the cuttlefish branches, the cloud on blue ground, the blur of spear roots." ('Futures')

The page brims with sensory expression "everything unpreventable and excited" is manifest in a uproar of colour and rhythmic buoyancy. A fresh vision of Romantic imagery runs uninterruptedly over several sentences.

…running towards me.Then here you 
                          are, you came all this
                                     distance, 
                                                                                 ('Loan')

The geometry of line breaking is important here. The reader is acclimatised to a largo, somnambulistic movement around an image of nature, which without notice, procreates insistent velocity. A sweep forward, and the relationship between speaker and love object reaches a dead end.

& what 
                    says the eye-thinking heart,        is the
                                        last colour seen, the last word
heard 
                                                                             ('Futures')

Graham’s form enacts the art of human destruction upon the images of nature.

The syntagmatic necessity, the driving progression that the form inspires, suddenly stunts, shuts down on, and squishes the epicentral image.

As readers, we are never allowed to recoil from this uncanny moment; the "tipping point" of loss, which Graham’s trademark enjambment generates. It serves as a painful reminder that humanity has arrived at the finale of its comfort zone.

Line breaks take control. Like humanity, form doesn’t notice its own destructive paradigm. The emphatic interest in the beloved image of nature, is sullied in its drag. The reality of environmental crisis becomes manifest.

An image is pushed to the precipice. The reader is dropped off, left teetering on the claustrophobic right hand side of the page. We start in present, comfortable prosody. We finish in future with nothing.

Neither nature, nor the present can be sustained; we take both for granted. We forget that they are fallible, and will collapse, wilt and degenerate.

In the frightening poem,‘Root End’, Graham engenders this atmosphere of devastation better than anywhere else. In the line breaks, every image undergoes a violent disappearing act, subsumed in mortality; it expires, and is forgotten.

                               the dusk is already
crushed tight and cannot be looked into/ anymore

The music of Graham’s form provokes change in its terrifying jolt of white space and line break, which emulates natural disaster. Graham lays bare the chaos of what it would be like to see everything we hold dear, ruined.

The form of "Sea change" is so self-destructive, that it forces the language into rhetorical questioning.

…. who shall repair this now. And how the future
      takes shape
      too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving 
      nothing….

A semi-philosophical, metaphysical volta always sidesteps the initial natural image. The focus of the work is deliberately blurred, cascaded over strands of language, and out of the blue, before you know it, Graham has moved on; the self-centred human speaker cuckolds the love object of nature.

Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind.
                                                Own what?
                                                                              (Futures)

A colloquial liveliness separates sites of divergent modulation and lexicon. Like line breaks, they contribute to a sense of disruption; the poems are not about what we think they are about, but about the process that the form inspires.The visual trajectory seems to follow an overarching chronology; the reader is forced to acknowledge that change is at constant groundswell, and could upsurge at any moment.

It is not necessary to read Graham’s interviews to realise that "Sea Change" is not intended as categorically polemical, an advocation of global issues. If it were, poetry would seem a limited tool for dissemination. As Graham has stated previously, she wants "Sea Change" to ‘serve art foremost’, to attract consideration only as poetry, relaying a Keatsesque consideration of the transition of beauty.

Form establishes itself as organic matter, an ivy, thriving and enveloping, then hacked down and dissected, added to, then taken away from. It is beautiful then disfigured, disfigured then beautiful. In this way, Graham makes the destructive process natural and inevitable. Perhaps she is being provocative, forcing us to accept environmental loss as certainty.

Numbered rows grew/ numberless long/ago.
                                                                          (Root End)

It is hard to believe therefore, that Graham does not see herself as educative; an Al Gore type, establishing more inconvenient truth. Her writing echoes with prophecy, an anxious glance of future, the pending and irreversible global destruction. Poems like ‘Underworld’ carry Old Testament credence; the punishable forces of the natural world unite.

                                                 My god gave
it me says the evaporation sluicing invisible 
                                                 surfaces

Whether or not she has meant to, Graham’s collection decides publicly the artist has an educative role, a social responsibility to document current affairs and matters of universal importance. "Sea Change" relates a terrifying sense of imminent human catastrophe, a disparaging prompt, an extended farewell to our loves, our ideological strongholds and any sense of infallibility.

Although this poetry collection is exceptional and important, surely it must be important for poets to consider themselves free, rather than socially obligated to educate. If Graham has done both, then that can only be excellent.