Runaway by Jorie Graham; It Says Here by Sean O’Brien; The Problem of the Many by Timothy Donnelly; and The Perfect Nine by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Jorie Graham’s poetry uniquely portrays the struggle to understand, to do the right thing, and above all to find meaning in the world’s “rich concentrate”. Her characteristically questioning work previously engaged with physics, history and personal morality, and now turns its attention to accelerating planetary crisis. Runaway (Carcanet, £12.99) was completed before the pandemic, but its capacious understanding makes it as able to speak to this as to climate breakdown and global suffering. Graham juxtaposes individual experience, “such local temporary wonders”, with an almost incomprehensible scale of disaster. She’s not the first to do so. “The Hiddenness of the World” pays homage to Edward Thomas’s first world war poem “At the Team’s Head Brass” while echoing Thomas Hardy’s contemporaneous “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”. But she’s doing it with urgency and an attention so exceptional it comes out as tenderness: “falling all round u / is gazing, thinking, attempted love, exhausted love”. Sweeping lines and fractured phrases, ampersands and italics, lines unexpectedly justified right: all of these wake us up to “the freshness of what’s / there”.
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