WashingtonPost.com: Poet's Choice

By Robert Hass

September 28, 1997

I'VE BEGUN to read in the new books of poems that appear in the fall like an apple harvest. The most talked-about of them is Jorie Graham's The Errancy (Ecco Press). Graham received the Pulitzer Prize for her selected poems, The Dream of the Unified Field (also Ecco), last year, and this book, her first new collection in some time, is one of her best. It arrives just after a relentlessly urbane New Yorker profile of her, which, as New Yorker profiles tend to, gave us a portrait of the poet and her endearing quirks and has almost nothing to say about the urgency and vision of the poems.

People always say about Graham that her poems are big and ambitious, that she's a gorgeous writer, and she's notoriously "difficult," as a lot of original poets are. Her difficulty usually has to do with her magic, and part of her magic comes from the fact that her poems are not always easy to locate. For example, the last poem in her new book describes a man in robes dancing down an alley at sundown. Who or what is he? The poem doesn't tell us. He could be a man dancing down an alley, a Chaplinesque or harlequinesque figure perhaps, seen or imagined. Or he could be a metaphor for the dancing of the wind. Or for poetry. Or for a certain freedom that only the human soul sometimes has. There is even a moment when you think it may be a figure conjured while listening to music.

Graham is also notoriously intelligent, and the intelligence of the poems often consists in leaps of imagination, or leaps of inference. And, in the way of intelligence, these leaps can feel like sudden, surprising turns. They're not what you expected and they need to be read and read again. For example, the last eight lines of this same poem.

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Illustration by Anthony Russo

Of the Ever-Changing Agitation in the Air

By Jorie Graham

The man held his hands to his heart as
   he danced.
He slacked and swirled.
The doorways of the little city
blurred. Something
leaked out,
kindling the doorframes up,
making each entranceway
less true.
And darkness gathered
although it does not fall . . . And the little dance,
swinging this human all down the alleyway,
nervous little theme pushing itself along,
braiding, rehearsing,
constantly incomplete so turning and tacking -- 
oh what is there to finish? -- his robes made
   rustic by the reddish swirl,
which grows darker towards the end of the
avenue of course,
one hand on his chest,
one flung out to the side as he dances,
   taps, sings,
on his scuttling toes, now humming a little,
now closing his eyes as he twirls, growing smaller,
why does the sun rise? remember me always
   dear for I will
return -- 
liberty spooring in the evening air,
into which the lilacs open, the skirts uplift,
liberty and the blood-eye careening gently over 
   the giant earth,
and the cat in the doorway who does not
   mistake the world,
eyeing the spots where the birds must
eventually land --

From The Errancy by Jorie Graham (Ecco Press). Reprinted by permission.

Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."

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