In Sea Change, Graham traffics in large statements ('the / end of the world can be imagined', 'fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef'), but at times her thought can seem muddled, her diction puzzlingly imprecise, as when she writes that love is 'like a thing floating out on a frail but / perfect twig-end.' How do we respond to a poet who is certain about the Great Barrier Reef but evasive about what stands before her eyes?
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Counting the swans, observing them closely, is for Yeats a way of reinhabiting ordinary life, as it is for Graham. Except that Graham is suspicious of the work of precision: to her, it feels like 'ownership', as if to name the world certainly were to lock it down, close off possibility, get it wrong.
This suspicion is commendable philosophically and politically--especially if one's subject is the end of the world; nobody wants to be Chicken Little. But it's poetically problematic, since poems thrive on precision, and with a skilled poet like Graham, the avoidance of precision should not be anything but precise--a conscious choice to appear confused and incomplete. Why would a poet feign the inability to find the exact word for the thing at the end of a branch? Are a poet's errors of perception comparable to the mistakes that raised the temperature of the Gulf Stream, forcing a plum tree in Normandy to blossom out of season? |
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