POETS’ CORNER

Jorie GRAHAM’S new book of poems, “Overlord,” like her other collections, has immense philosophical and compositional ambitions. It seeks to interrogate history just as it seeks to explore accountability and document extremity embodied in the warnings of a dying Earth, following in the footsteps of the “retreating God.”

”.... I thought each new

note, plucked from the as-yet-unpronounced, covered up

a footstep of the retreating God.”

“Overlord” was the World War II code name for the invasion of Western Europe by Allied forces at Normandy on June 6, 1944 -- D-day.

It is also, in Graham’s terms, the idea of force majeure, the principle of dominance and suffering that configures the “politics” of nature and reality. (“What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species and souls, lord over?”)

Her narrator-in-the-present listens to the sounds of gunshots in the hedgerows near Omaha Beach in Normandy and recognizes the sound of hunters stalking prey in the same marshes where young soldiers once listened for the enemy.

Her sudden time shifts reveal an indifference to chronological history -- “There’s no such thing as time I / think ...” -- although the research and documentation of historical events are dramatic in detail. Ultimately, the poems are intent on realizing the meaning of human presence and absence on Earth, as revealed both through recorded events and impassioned inquiry. Like all poems of passion, they attempt to collapse time, to restore empathy to resistant surfaces, and they succeed.

“Overlord’s” first poem sets out the collection’s recurrent and sustaining insight, “We can be absent, no one can tell.” The first poem, structured as a kind of botched prayer (first in a series of like prayers), acknowledges the idea of a random deity (“The gods keep changing, but the prayers stay the same.”) dwarfed by the power of human desire to survive in some form, making of absence, or death itself, a living contradiction.

The poet asks: “What are you making present?” The response to this question, to the prayer-inquiry, will never be, she seems to be saying, fully apprehended -- the disappearing world, the vanishing body and intellect leave only traces of the continuum of failed perception -- within the failing world itself (“... the water running out, the animals dying ... “).

“Overlord” veers close to despair without succumbing, and its moral anguish is unrelenting and proactive. These poems are meant to “stand in for” the sacrificed body, the sacrifice of the grave in the farmed earth of Normandy -- where even now teeth and uniform buttons turn up and yield the identities of the dead.

The Allied invasion in Operation Overlord may be the central temporal event, the historical marker, but its absent presence is seen as an ongoing emanation of energy that radiates into the future: our present. Thus, in the book’s most moving passages, Graham “excerpts” the actual “voices” (from cemetery records) of dead Allied soldiers:

I was Don Whitsett

I flew a B-26 medium bomber

Number 131657 called the Mississippi Mudcat

The exhortation to the reader, later in the book, that one must insist upon one’s own existence, lends an inward-turning energy (stopping just short of self-scrutiny) to “Overlord’s” poetic zeitgeist and moves it beyond T.S. Eliot’s “infinitely patient, infinitely suffering thing” to another level of insight and tenacity. The poems enact a type of realistic recovery. Their polyvocality invites theoretical analysis -- but this is not meant to be a book driven by the conceptual, unlike other books by Graham.

Although the “supreme commander” will commute no one’s sentence, the force of this poet’s will -- fierce, brilliant and implacable -- insists that everything exists in some form, even extinction. “Overlord” gives voice to uncanny acts of heroism -- actual and recreated. “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”: The implied directive seems often to be taken from Eliot’s sense of the disappearing world, although there is no departure from the self-destructive universe in Graham.

... But the fall -- the falling

of it

even after it’s done -- the fall: continues.

Because there is no way to get the killing to end. *