Swarm: Poems

About this book

With Swarm her first new collection since The Errancy Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham has given us a book-length sequence of poems stunning in its sober encounter with destiny eros and law. The narrator at times almost vertigo-ridden by the problem of who is addressed-whom there still is to address-negotiates passionately with those powers human beings feel themselves to be "underneath": God matter law custom the force of love. To "swarm" is to leave an originating organisma hive a home country a stable sense of ones body a stable hierarchy of values -- in an attempt by coming apart to found a new form that will hold. The Roman Empire its distillation in the Forums remains the Romantic imagination of that buried past ("underneath") as well as the collapse of the erotic border between lovers bodies are persistent metaphors for the destabilization and reformation of the idea and sensation of personhood. The "first" person and "enjambment" are characters in this book as are the fragment the gap the sentence. And everywhere lovers seek to find the borders that must break as well as those that must at all cost hold. Clytemnestra await-ing Agamemnon Calypso veiling Ulysses Daphne accepting Apollo -- a variety of mythological characters reappear here ea-ger to plead their stories into sense desper-ate for some insight into the buried justice of natural law.