[To] the last [be] human
Description
[To] The Last [Be] Human collects fourextraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—byPulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.
From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:
The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts permillion; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. Thebody of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of thoseeighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, writtenfrom within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rifewith hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerfulto experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-timefuture, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Butthey are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they arevery far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: topreserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when‘the future / takes shape / too quickly,’ when we are entering ‘a time / beyondbelief.’ They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form….Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeinglanguage; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping giftof the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ‘whirling robehumming with firstness,’ there to ‘greet you if you eye-up.’
I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry forpresentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ‘Wind would benice but / it’s only us shaking.’ … To read these four twenty-first-centurybooks together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patternsforming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing withinthemselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song thatjoins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of thelast book:
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening…
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
Collecting Graham's four stellar eco-poetic volumes, this searing and sensitive portrait of environmental contingency is as formally ambitious as it is captivating and wise. As Robert Macfarlane aptly writes in his beautiful introduction, the task of these poems is one "of record as well as of warning: to preserve what it felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when 'the future / takes shape / too quickly.'" In "Positive Feedback Loop (June 2007)," Graham writes, "I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget/ everything, start listening./ Tipping point, flash/ point,/ convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland... fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is/ now/ says the silence-that-precedes--you know not what/ you/ are entering,/ a time beyond belief." Her most recent collection, Runaway, poignantly ends with "Poem": "The earth said/ remember me./ The earth said/ don't let go,// said it one day/ when I was/ accidentally/ listening, I// heard it, I felt it/ like temperature,/ all said in a/ whisper--build to-// morrow, make right befall..." To hold these volumes together is to have proof of Graham's unmatched powers and to reckon with the resilience the present age demands. (Sept.)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Collecting Graham's four stellar eco-poetic volumes, this searing and sensitive portrait of environmental contingency is as formally ambitious as it is captivating and wise. As Robert Macfarlane aptly writes in his beautiful introduction, the task of these poems is one "of record as well as of warning: to preserve what it felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when ‘the future / takes shape / too quickly.'" In "Positive Feedback Loop (June 2007)," Graham writes, "I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget/ everything, start listening./ Tipping point, flash/ point,/ convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland... fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is/ now/ says the silence-that-precedes—you know not what/ you/ are entering,/ a time beyond belief." Her most recent collection, Runaway, poignantly ends with "Poem": "The earth said/ remember me./ The earth said/ don't let go,// said it one day/ when I was/ accidentally/ listening, I// heard it, I felt it/ like temperature,/ all said in a/ whisper—build to-// morrow, make right befall..." To hold these volumes together is to have proof of Graham's unmatched powers and to reckon with the resilience the present age demands. (Sept.)
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