JORIE GRAHAM
Swarm
Carcanet £8.95

KIT WRIGHT
Hoping It Might Be So
Leviathan £15.00 Hbk £10.00 Pbk

I'd been looking forward to reading Jorie Graham's new book. I'd bought her The Dream of the Unified Field.(Selected Poems 1974-1994) in a bookshop in Princeton, N.J., some years ago, and I remember opening it at a poem called "Steering Wheel", which begins like this:

In the rear view mirror I saw the veil of leaves
auctioned up by a change of current
and how they stayed up, for the alloted time,
in absolute fidelity to the force behind,
magenta, hovering, a thing that happens,
slowly upswirling above the driveway
I was preparing to back clear out of —

— lines, it seemed to me, that had a clarity of vision, and a syntactical strength rooted in that urge to describe precisely, that "absolute fidelity". Look at the Hopkins-esque touch of "slowly upswirling", followed by the lovely demotic cluster of "to back clear out of"— which, in its grammatical particularity, its insistence on the particles of speech, picks its way through its own field of vision.

Being in North America, I could see the American car in the driveway, and the gust of leaves rising behind it in an epiphanic William Carlos Williams kind of moment ("no ideas but in things"). But then, as the poem moves on, it begins to question its own powers of observation: ("Oh but I haven't got it right").

As I flick through The Dream of the Unified Field again, I begin to realize again how such questioning permeates the whole book. "The light shone down taking the shape of a lie / lifting each outline up, making it wear a name." ("Picnic") So perhaps I shouldn't have been completely surprised to find that Jorie Graham's latest collection, Swarm, asks a lot of questions.

To advance the bee metaphor, it does a lot of buzzing around the bush. Even the title page presents problems: the first poem, or section (since the blurb announces Swarm as a book-length sequence) is called "from The Reformation Journal", implying a body of work to which the reader (at least this reader) is not privy. So the reader is immediately thrown off balance.

Similarly, 16 of the book's 37 sections are titled as sub-sections of another sequence called "Underneath", except that there they occur out of synch: "Underneath (9)" is on page 8;"Underneath (7)" on page 53; "Underneath (I)", "Under-neath (2)", "Underneath (3)", and "Underneath (8) on pages59, 63, 65 and 67 respectively, and so on.

This broken-up jigsaw texture is also realized in the poems themselves, which are full of gaps, asterisks, elisions, and non-sequiturs. One of Graham's characteristic tropes is the use of the word "explain", followed by a gap and a word or phrase:

Explain     the six missing seeds
Explain        muzzled
Explain     tongue breaks   thin fire   in eyes [ . . . ]
Explain     requited
Explain     indeed the blood of your lives I will require
explain the strange weight of meanwhile
                                                                               ("Underneath (9)")     

To whom are these disembodied imperatives addressed? To the reader? To the poet herself? What's the difference between the upper-case "Explain" and the lower-case "explain"? Is the lack of a gap in the latter construction significant? If so, why? Does any of this matter? Carcanet's press release does little to dispel the fog:

"Key factors in this collection are the first person, the enjambment, the phrase, the gap and the sentence ... Graham introduces us to the lovers--those who seek the border they must break as well as those they must at all costs hold. Clytemnestra awaits Agamemnon, Calypso veils Ulysses, Daphne accepts Apollo; figures familiar from her earlier books reappear, making the poetry friendly and, accessible." (The odd comma after "and" is sic.)

Well, I think not: if Swarm can be said to have a theme, or an attitude, it is one of dislocation, of dismantling meaning rather than making it, of disappointing the reader rather than fulfilling any readerly expectation. Given that there is no agreed understanding of what constitutes a line in this poetry, the notion of enjambment itself becomes meaningless, since line-breaks can occur anywhere. The lines, the language, are continually worried about, and worried at. "A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but it may not be worried into being," says Robert Frost.

Here and there, amid the deliberately problematic gestures of this book, are a few pieces which read as fully achieved poems by conventional standards ("Two Days", for instance); and here and there, some well-turned phrases: "the battle took so long that soon between the enemies / the bonds /emerged" .and "the acid slippers of eternity being tied on each new foot", which has an Emily Dickinson feel to it.

And Dickinson is indeed acknowledged in the "Notes" to Swarm—her poem no. 640, we are told, "animates the book throughout". This can be read as a poem about fragmentation and dislocation; it begins:

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the shelf
The Sexton keeps the key to —
Putting up
Our Life — his Porcelain —
Like a Cup
Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A new Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —     

I am reminded, now, of Dickinson's famous reproof to one of her first readers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "You may think my gait 'spasmodic'. I am in danger, Sir. You think me 'uncontrolled'. I have no tribunal . . . " But Graham is no Dickinson, at least not in the way her writing has been received by her contemporaries.

Some tribunal awarded Jorie Graham a Pulitzer Prize for her work. She was recently appointed Boylston Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. If her work often appears to distrusts its own method, it is not because it has been questioned by the academy; rather, the academy, these days, approves of self-interrogation; and the procedures of the American poetry workshop can often appear, to a native of these islands (I mean Great Britain and Ireland) as esoteric as the explorations of quantum physicists.

Kit Wright's poetry couldn't be more different. Hoping It Might be So (poems 1974-2000) shows influences of Betjeman, Larkin, Gavin Ewart (to whom a poem is dedicated); and, at times, Auden. His poems are well made according to well-tried recipes. They mostly rhyme and scan.

Enjambement (I'd spell it with the "e", in his case) definitely does mean something, since the line is a definite unit. Was it Frost (again) who said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net? Wright likes a net; he is also, on the evidence of his poems, a cricket enthusiast, which game provides a good metaphor for his own work. Cricket is English, traditional. Although perhaps its complicated operations can appear impenetrable to the outsider, it abides by a definite set of rules, and these rules can be learned. It can be beautiful to watch. It can be enjoyable (a word, somehow, that one shrinks from applying to Jorie Graham's work--it's much too serious to be simply enjoyed).

Another enthusiasm, and influence, is that of song, whether it be popular ballads, folk, blues, or Country 'n' Western; and Wright entertainingly exploits these conventions. Here is a poem in its entirety, "A Love Song of Tooting":

In Tooting, the tomato
        Hangs heavy on the vine
The blackbird's obbligato
        Fulfils its liquid line
On summertime allotments
        By lenient design

Nine beanrows will I have there,
        Not ten, not eight, but nine.
And I shall build a pav there
        Or shed of weathered pine,
And all shall be contentment
        Down by the railway line.

My shed, beside a toolbox,
        A coolbox shall confine
And we shall from the coolbox
        Quaff the rare white wine.
The dove shall plight its true love
        And I shall sing to mine.

There's something about the accomplished silliness of this that reminds me of another very English writer, P.G. Wodehouse. But the same techniques can lend themselves to metaphysical speculation. Again, here is a whole poem, "The Power of Prayer":

Very, very little of his garden
  Did God elect to seed.
The rest he leased to utter, outer blankness
  Invaded by the rankness
    Of not a single weed.
Many, many mansions has his dwelling.
  His own bedsit is small.
A vast and speechless city crumbles round it.
  Never a one has found it
    Anywhere at all.

Poetry, too, has many mansions. It could be argued that this little lyric contains as much philosophical angst as the tortured, self-abnegating syntaxes of Jorie Graham; other readers might find it too pat. And, of course, many, many other readers do not read poetry at all.

Ciaran Carson's novel, Shamrock Tea, is published by Granta in March. His latest volume of poetry The Twelfth of Never, is available from Picador.