Yes, I will confess: I never had a clue what Jorie Graham was about. Almost didn't care; though something appealed to me in the fragment, the frenetic jump, the denial of imposition of meaning, the coy opening of the poet's arms: daring me to climb inside, drown even. Well, "Swarm": I'm telling you, I still don't get it, but the book opens Graham's style wide, the way a drop of ink runs to gray in water. I can feel her hitting a fevered pitch in the form/al experimentation that began with "End of Beauty." No friends, these poems aren't any "easier" than the ones that came before--but there is something in them different, not any more closure, not any more willingness to help you navigate, yet the book itself coheres as a unit. Past the the pre-lingual linguistic utterances I can detect repeated themes, scattered clues. I've read and re-read the book three times now and plan to continue. I hate to sound like one of the "converted" but I must say I am beginning to believe Jorie Graham has something to do with my daily life, my understanding of this strange sign-driven world, my hapless navigation through it.

Nobody but Jorie Graham could write poetry this intense, structural, abstract, and do it successfully. The first aspect of this poetry that one notices is that Jorie Graham has left the standard line/narrative/physical world format almost completely behind, writing a lot of one-line stanzas, and leaving large space between words for the reader to fill. It doesn't look like standard poetry (well, maybe a poem or two do). The second aspect of the poetry in this book is that she's taken words so far from solid ground and scattered them into the stratosphere. In this book you will not find any images like salmon swimming upstream...you will find a minimalism of words where possible, attaching to concepts, not anything sensory that's so easy to hold onto. In Swarm, you're more likely to find lines like "Where definition first comes upon us empire" or "Explain inseparable explain common". At first you will not understand the connections between these words, but they are there, and they are vast. From the first poem to to the last and still reflectng back on it, I've always hoped this book would be remembered in the annals of poetry as the revolutionary book that it is. Jorie Graham is the poet to start a new poetic era. Read this book, you'll find her "planting a wildfire in your head".

And after seeing how people either seem to love this book or hate it according to the reviews here, Swarm is controversial if nothing else.

Swarm is an extraordinarily moving and brilliant new book of poems by Jorie Graham. "To all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts," she quotes from Emily Dickinson. These meditations on presence, silence, and loss may seem abstract at first, but in fact are about experiences common to us all. Try reading the poems aloud--they will teach you how to read them. And the subtle and intricate layering of meaning will become more and more apparent to you.

The reader (formally, or currently, on Jorie's payroll?) who doesn't know "who Sven Birkerts is" is not much of a reader. Birkerts has written a number of well-acclaimed books. His review of Jorie Graham's book is accurate and fair. Coming to Jorie's defense is silly. It seems like so much personal nonsense, compared to Birkerts review. Let her have her silences and stutters and philosophical failures, and let her embrace them like a good existentialist. But remember, the poetry that survives will be made up of words (besides "I" and "it" and "is"--words that Jorie can't escape in her latest collection). Can anyone recite a line of Graham's poetry since Erosion? Well, why not? Because it's not memorable like good poetry. Actually, the first line of "Estuary" might be good if the poem were comic: "She wondered about the year 1000. She". That would be a good one, but there is NO sense of humor in Graham's poetry. Imagine what James Tate could get out of a line like that. The book is actually very sentimental, and snipingly political, and, dare I say, a bit hypocritical. As if Jorie doesn't love shopping.

I don't know who Sven Birkerts is, but his obsession with Jorie Graham's processual poetic seems to have blinded him to her overriding concerns: how could anyone do a review of this book-as Birkerts did in this week's New York Times-and not even address the book's subject? The poems in Never are about evolution (with titles such as "Evolution" and "Kyoto")-about an intricate, dynamic, disastrous, shining process of change in the natural world that we move in and that moves in us. It makes no sense to speak of Graham's interest in process and perception apart from her subject matter. These poems are the attempts of a speaker who is swiftly disappearing to perceive a world that is swiftly disappearing (every nine minutes, Graham points out in her notes, a species becomes extinct) and as such they are prayers-urgent and visionary-directed at some transcendent horizon that feels at once vast and full of purpose (the ocean is pushed up onto the shore and pulls back to deposit, gently, creatures) and catastrophically close. These poems are full of direction: they strive forward, looking back, "pushed forever from behind." They seem to have the future *in* them and yet to be reaching ahead for further futures, never exhausted but bright, searching, and alert. Their speakers imagine what it feels like to be plural (a species), to be specific (a body, a growing self), to be always in the company of the living, at times to be perfectly held and complete (the manyness of fish and birdsong and grasses rising up in waves of water and air), to be witness to the argument between the single gull and the flock, the citizen and the city, disagreements that unfold into song; to be witness to a world that shall one day exclude us (as we see everywhere already that it excludes us). And perhaps these poems are lingering in a different sort of time than we are accustomed to as readers: some kind of vast, evolutionary, geological time that we usually infer (it leaves its tracks in water and stone) without being able to *see*, and here we see it, or feel it rise up invisibly for a series of instants, and then it is withdrawn, interrupted by the historical sense of time in which we habitually live (nine minutes, a century). "Never again are you the same," the speaker says in the opening prayer. "The longing / is to be pure. What you get is to be changed." This change is beautiful and painful and I do not know what it means, always, but I know that many weeks later it is difficult to shake loose from my heart. Can this be the same book Birkerts is writing about? He says there is "nowhere to get to" in these poems that so celebrate process. Here, then, are some examples of where Graham's poems "get to." They turn and face extinction from the point of view of the living:

the fishermen seen from the back as they
disappear through the palms.

They release powers on the threshold of extinction:

devoted servants: road signs: footprints: you are not alone:
slowly in the listener the prisoners emerge:
slowly in you reader they stand like madmen facing into the wind:
nowhere is there any trace of blood
spilled in the service of kings, or love, or for the sake of honor,
or for some other reason.

And they reveal what extinction might look like from the point of view of the beyond, as in this poem's encounter with a slowly breaking wave:

look up, further out: to where, it seems,
nothing but steady forward progress in its perfect
time occurs: onward, onward: tiny patterns which
seen from above must: it is imagined: perfectly: shine).

With Swarm, the book before Never, Jorie Graham withheld so much from the reader -- as much as she could, I would say, without the poem completely disintegrating. Here, with Never, as she explains in the first poem in the book, Prayer, she gives as much as she can. In Swarm, there were a lot of veils. Here, she writes often of gold & inlcination. She also writes about nature by really being in the places in her life she's while writing about them. The strongest place in this book is the beach, as Jorie Graham feels that she's at a critical place between different worlds. I don't mean in terms of criticism.

Listen, watching the complexitry of a bird make song she says, "no native immaterial quiver time turns material". Jorie Graham, to me, is one of the greatest visionary poets of our time. The poems in this book are the size of her mind & ambition, massive. They resonate with urgency. Each has such deep background in itself. Jorie Graham has said that to stay creative, you have to erase your path behind you as you proceed. Here, she erases the apocalyptic abstractness of Swarm. SHe's now in a very solid world (or at least aware that there's a solid world around her from which abstraction comes). There's much thought devoted to description. She enjambs after articles a lot. She's also almost always on a beach in this book, where the different worlds of ocean & dry sand meet. The sounds, too, are incredible. A very notable poem, for me, is Solitude, which gives in so much to the truth of thought's constant abstractness. That poem is most like Swarm of anything in this book, but the thinking has moved on. The thinking has moved on.

With the dismantling of poetry she's done with her 3 books since her Pulitzer Prize-winning selected poems, the severe dismantling, one wonders what she'll do next.

As with any anthology of poetry, the content largely depends on the editor. However, from the wonderful introduction Jorie Graham provided, I expected an equally wonderful collection in a call of arms for poets to help poets realize what they do is equally valid as anything else a writer may write, be it fiction or non-fiction. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding even one poem that was more that just okay. Perhaps it should just be called American poetry of 1990. I would recommend the 1999 edition of this series over the 1990 edition.