To 2040
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:27th Apr '23
Should be back in stock very soon
Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2024
Winner of the Laurel Prize 2023
A Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The Irish Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year
To 2040 begins with question masquerading as fact: 'Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.' These visionary new poems reveal Graham as historian, cartographer, prophet, plotting an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant, 'the American experiment will end in 2030'. Graham exposes a potentially inevitable future, sirens sounding among industrial ruins. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, we pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a burrowing worm. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham invites the reader to sit silent, to hear soil breathe. To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality – in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first 'claw full of hair' placed gently on a green shower ledge. 2040 as both future and event-horizon: the reader leaves the book warned, wiser, attentively on edge. 'Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me'. The title poem asks, 'what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?'
'To 2040 is a collection to be experienced in all its movements and formations. It articulates the collective undercurrents of our consciousness, leading us beyond the brinks of our experience, flooding us with existential concerns and threats. To 2040 further cements the might of Jorie Graham's poetic work and her immense, oracular vision, which is as astonishing as it is necessary.'
Neha Mulay, The Adroit Journal
'This is an urgent, vivacious book based in stark reality but written with craft and beauty.'
Maria Crawford, Financial Times
'In her new book, Graham's poems continue to exhort us to be present, and she has found a startlingly intimate way of situating an individual consciousness among its precarious cohabitants.'
Walt Hunter, The Atlantic
'Of the many questions put throughout Jorie Graham's stunning new collection, To 2040, the first is the most urgent: "Are we / extinct yet."...The common shape of poems here is a precisely unbalanced four-line stanza: seldom do lines and phrases match, sentences spill across lines. It is the flow of intellect, the mind at work.'
Stephen Sexton, Irish Times
'The American writer's visionary 15th collection is one of her best books yet. These luminous poems consider the importance of attending to the wisdom nature offers us... A profound engagement with how our thinking about nature might change, and transform us in the process.'
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
'The poems are invigorating in their formal inventiveness and precise use of language. The surprising lineation, extension of white space, erosion of words (you/u) and accretion of phrases have the effect of tuning us into Graham’s mind; we follow her thoughts as she wrestles with our wilful destruction of the earth, shot through with images of hope.'
Jo Dixon,Everybody's Reviewing
'Graham is adept at this kind of philosophical, or, indeed neo-scientific, display... The result is blistering and overwhelming, a clear depiction of our extreme, accelerating existence.'
Kate Simpson, The Poetry Review
'Graham has always been the most voluble of poets'.
Fiona Green,London Review of Books
- Winner of Laurel Prize 2023
- Long-listed for Griffin Poetry Prize 2024
ISBN: 9781800173163
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
108 pages