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![Book Cover for: [To] the Last [Be] Human, Jorie Graham](https://d16057n354qyo4.cloudfront.net/9781556596605.jpg?nextExtension=webp&version=1734900146)
[To] the Last [Be] Human
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 3 reviews on
Nominee:PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection - (2023)
[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four
extraordinary poetry books--Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway--by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience ... Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time
future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But
they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are
very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to
preserve 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 / beyond
belief.' They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form....
Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing
language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift
of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a 'whirling robe
humming with firstness, ' there to 'greet you if you eye-up.' I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for
presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: 'Wind would be
nice but / it's only us shaking.' ... To read these four twenty-first-century
books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns
forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within
themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that
joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the
last book:
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don't let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening...
extraordinary poetry books--Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway--by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience ... Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time
future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But
they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are
very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to
preserve 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 / beyond
belief.' They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form....
Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing
language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift
of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a 'whirling robe
humming with firstness, ' there to 'greet you if you eye-up.' I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for
presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: 'Wind would be
nice but / it's only us shaking.' ... To read these four twenty-first-century
books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns
forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within
themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that
joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the
last book:
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don't let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening...
Book Details
- Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
- Publish Date: Sep 6th, 2022
- Pages: 336
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.00in - 7.30in - 1.20in - 1.40lb
- EAN: 9781556596605
- Categories: • American - General• Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Animals & Nature
About the Author
Graham, Jorie: -
Jorie Graham is the author of a dozen collections of poetry,
including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She
divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she
teaches at Harvard University.
Jorie Graham is the author of a dozen collections of poetry,
including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She
divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she
teaches at Harvard University.
MacFarlane, Robert: -
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and
bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Underland:
A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages,
won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film,
television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers,
actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine
Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize for
Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and
bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Underland:
A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages,
won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film,
television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers,
actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine
Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize for
Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
Praise for [To] The Last [Be] Human"Jorie Graham faces the future anguished but unblinking in this magnificent collection of her four most recent books. . . . Their importance goes beyond the literary. . . . She is weathervane, sentinel, about-to-be lost soul. What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualizing the future. . . . There is no such thing, in this poetry, of an untainted present. The flow, at times, reminds you of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, although more diluvial, and the preoccupation with time of TS Eliot's "Four Quartets"--minus the consoling decorum. Every poem is an attempt at orientation--sometimes within a disorienting void. However considered Graham's revisions, the sense is of being in the moment with her--intimacy the closest thing to consolation. . . . At 72, Graham is writing for her life, and ours."--Guardian
"This omnibus edition of Graham's four most recent poetry books reifies her turn toward the climate crisis as a theme, but also highlights the way her great subject has always been and continues to be human consciousness, the manifold and many-folded self."--New York Times, Editors Choice
"A monumental exploration of consciousness in an age of ecological, political, and existential crisis."--New Yorker, Best Books of 2022
"One of the greatest living ecopoetic writers, Graham is an essential voice in American poetry. This volume, which compiles her latest four collections, paints a dazzling and often unnerving portrait of environmental contingency in poems that ambitiously and unblinkingly tackle all aspects of the human experience. Graham's power as a thinker and poet shines in these pages."--Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2022
"In its movement from hopeful naïveté to outright pessimism, [To] the Last [Be] Human tracks not only Graham's attitude toward the nature of climate change but also the evolution of our cultural discourse. What once seemed a bleak but distant possibility now appears inevitable. But if the poems themselves no longer inspire social action, perhaps the doom conveyed in these later poems might serve another purpose. If readers imagine this book, as Graham does, as an artifact to be 'dug up from rubble in the future, ' it maintains value for later readers from distant generations or civilizations. In this sense, Graham's depiction of a world in the midst of its own ruin serves less as an antidote for impending devastation--it's too late for that--than as a minority report on our humanistic response to it, one that might persist, as Macfarlane says, across 'the long light of the will-have-been, ' even if we've failed to correct the course of our environmental history."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Why think, why write, why break the silence? I have wondered sometimes if global warming makes our own deaths feel more real, as though threats to civilization were an overdeath, as though we had to die twice. But if 'the synthetic materials last forever, ' as Graham writes in 'Deep Water Trawling' (our plastics are destined to outlive our species), there is also a sense in which our work lasts forever. 'What the lips just inconceivably apart can make, ' she wrote in 'The End of Beauty, ' 'cannot then, ever again, be uncreated.' Art exists in theoretical permanence. It may not be remembered--there may be no record--but it did, at least, happen. There is some point of view, I'm convinced, from which everything matters. In the poem 'Untitled, ' first published in Place (2012), Graham's speaker addresses a posited reader from a deep-time future: 'you out there/peering in, listening, to see who we were: here: this was history: /their turn/is all they actually have/flowing in them.'"--New York Times
"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."'. . . To hold these volumes together is to have proof of Graham's unmatched powers and to reckon with the resilience the present age demands."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This collection gives the reader the sensation of everything happening at once, an acceleration so complete that it feels like the apocalyptic end has already arrived. . . . To go about daily life, I am suspended between resignation and activism, and engage in too little of the latter. Graham's tetralogy gives the reader a different possibility: adaptation and radical witness. Her language and poetic structure adapt to her changing world and reality, and never succumb to denial. Words themselves shift--letters fall off of common words, in the familiar way that texting has reduced much language. Further, the orientation of the poem is frequently disrupted and justified right, bringing tension to the structure and giving the reader a visual and impending cliff."--Rumpus
"Jorie Graham's urgent and despairing [To] The Last [Be] Human stands as a thick and insistent testament of our time--this time of human-driven ecological crises."--Orion"Graham is a master of her craft, perhaps unparalleled at reflecting the human condition as we approach a post-human world. To read her is to enter a world of meditative beauty and metaphysical loneliness; that such private states can be made so touchingly public is her great gift."--Rain Taxi
"Jorie Graham has perfected the art of the stormy, sublime poem for decades. . . . [exhibiting] tremendous choicefulness where the drama of the lone figure in the light of the anthropocene is visible."--The Common Reader
"In what might be humanity's final hours, Jorie Graham's recent poetry offers an elegiac grace for our species. What I've always treasured in Graham--how she registers her mind's acrobatic detours and excursions on the page, rendering this for her readers--is still here, but her latest books are possibly more momentous, reflecting her concerns about climate disasters, extinction, and the increasing disembodiment resulting from our headlong technological expansion."--Jessica Reed, Annulet Poetics
Praise for Jorie Graham"One of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. . . . Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. . . . Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us 'like a ring into the sea.' It's a truism that poetry's task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.)."--New Yorker
"Graham is one of our great poets. Her
words will long outlast all of this chatter." --New York Times "Every poem, Graham suggests, is part net
and part wind, its finely knotted phrases and lines straining to 'hold, ' for
longer than an instant, the presence passing through them." --New Yorker
"We will always need to read Jorie Graham,
and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last forty years of
poetry in America." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Graham begins her fifth decade of
publishing with a bravura performance that probes the present for what the
future will bring." --Publishers Weekly "Graham has long been breaking open the
lyric voice, seeing how much of the vast, fractured, overwhelming present it
can contain. Often she explores a self that won't hold together but must still
be held accountable--as a political entity, a citizen." --Harper's Magazine "Pulitzer Prize winner Graham's poems are
like those of John Donne and e.e. cummings but on speed dial. Like Donne,
Graham seeks to encounter the metaphysics of everything." --Library
Journal "Graham's poems act as the sonar devices
of contemporary western consciousness, probing the depths of human existential
experience." --Guardian
"This omnibus edition of Graham's four most recent poetry books reifies her turn toward the climate crisis as a theme, but also highlights the way her great subject has always been and continues to be human consciousness, the manifold and many-folded self."--New York Times, Editors Choice
"A monumental exploration of consciousness in an age of ecological, political, and existential crisis."--New Yorker, Best Books of 2022
"One of the greatest living ecopoetic writers, Graham is an essential voice in American poetry. This volume, which compiles her latest four collections, paints a dazzling and often unnerving portrait of environmental contingency in poems that ambitiously and unblinkingly tackle all aspects of the human experience. Graham's power as a thinker and poet shines in these pages."--Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2022
"In its movement from hopeful naïveté to outright pessimism, [To] the Last [Be] Human tracks not only Graham's attitude toward the nature of climate change but also the evolution of our cultural discourse. What once seemed a bleak but distant possibility now appears inevitable. But if the poems themselves no longer inspire social action, perhaps the doom conveyed in these later poems might serve another purpose. If readers imagine this book, as Graham does, as an artifact to be 'dug up from rubble in the future, ' it maintains value for later readers from distant generations or civilizations. In this sense, Graham's depiction of a world in the midst of its own ruin serves less as an antidote for impending devastation--it's too late for that--than as a minority report on our humanistic response to it, one that might persist, as Macfarlane says, across 'the long light of the will-have-been, ' even if we've failed to correct the course of our environmental history."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Why think, why write, why break the silence? I have wondered sometimes if global warming makes our own deaths feel more real, as though threats to civilization were an overdeath, as though we had to die twice. But if 'the synthetic materials last forever, ' as Graham writes in 'Deep Water Trawling' (our plastics are destined to outlive our species), there is also a sense in which our work lasts forever. 'What the lips just inconceivably apart can make, ' she wrote in 'The End of Beauty, ' 'cannot then, ever again, be uncreated.' Art exists in theoretical permanence. It may not be remembered--there may be no record--but it did, at least, happen. There is some point of view, I'm convinced, from which everything matters. In the poem 'Untitled, ' first published in Place (2012), Graham's speaker addresses a posited reader from a deep-time future: 'you out there/peering in, listening, to see who we were: here: this was history: /their turn/is all they actually have/flowing in them.'"--New York Times
"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."'. . . To hold these volumes together is to have proof of Graham's unmatched powers and to reckon with the resilience the present age demands."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This collection gives the reader the sensation of everything happening at once, an acceleration so complete that it feels like the apocalyptic end has already arrived. . . . To go about daily life, I am suspended between resignation and activism, and engage in too little of the latter. Graham's tetralogy gives the reader a different possibility: adaptation and radical witness. Her language and poetic structure adapt to her changing world and reality, and never succumb to denial. Words themselves shift--letters fall off of common words, in the familiar way that texting has reduced much language. Further, the orientation of the poem is frequently disrupted and justified right, bringing tension to the structure and giving the reader a visual and impending cliff."--Rumpus
"Jorie Graham's urgent and despairing [To] The Last [Be] Human stands as a thick and insistent testament of our time--this time of human-driven ecological crises."--Orion"Graham is a master of her craft, perhaps unparalleled at reflecting the human condition as we approach a post-human world. To read her is to enter a world of meditative beauty and metaphysical loneliness; that such private states can be made so touchingly public is her great gift."--Rain Taxi
"Jorie Graham has perfected the art of the stormy, sublime poem for decades. . . . [exhibiting] tremendous choicefulness where the drama of the lone figure in the light of the anthropocene is visible."--The Common Reader
"In what might be humanity's final hours, Jorie Graham's recent poetry offers an elegiac grace for our species. What I've always treasured in Graham--how she registers her mind's acrobatic detours and excursions on the page, rendering this for her readers--is still here, but her latest books are possibly more momentous, reflecting her concerns about climate disasters, extinction, and the increasing disembodiment resulting from our headlong technological expansion."--Jessica Reed, Annulet Poetics
Praise for Jorie Graham"One of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. . . . Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. . . . Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us 'like a ring into the sea.' It's a truism that poetry's task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.)."--New Yorker
"Graham is one of our great poets. Her
words will long outlast all of this chatter." --New York Times "Every poem, Graham suggests, is part net
and part wind, its finely knotted phrases and lines straining to 'hold, ' for
longer than an instant, the presence passing through them." --New Yorker
"We will always need to read Jorie Graham,
and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last forty years of
poetry in America." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Graham begins her fifth decade of
publishing with a bravura performance that probes the present for what the
future will bring." --Publishers Weekly "Graham has long been breaking open the
lyric voice, seeing how much of the vast, fractured, overwhelming present it
can contain. Often she explores a self that won't hold together but must still
be held accountable--as a political entity, a citizen." --Harper's Magazine "Pulitzer Prize winner Graham's poems are
like those of John Donne and e.e. cummings but on speed dial. Like Donne,
Graham seeks to encounter the metaphysics of everything." --Library
Journal "Graham's poems act as the sonar devices
of contemporary western consciousness, probing the depths of human existential
experience." --Guardian