[To] The Last [Be] Human

[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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