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    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
    Ebook99 pages46 minutes

    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

    By Jorie Graham

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    About this ebook

    "How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "Mother's Sewing Box," "For My Father Looking for My Uncle," and "The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria." Finally, the poet's words again: ". . . you get / just what you want" and (just before that), "Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."--Marvin Bell

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 14, 2011
    ISBN9781400831449
    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
    Author

    Jorie Graham

    Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

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    • 5/5
      Bright, accessible, and brilliant. Early Jorie Graham is stunningly intelligent.

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    Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts - Jorie Graham

    Syntax

    I

    THE WAY THINGS WORK

    is by admitting

    or opening away.

    This is the simplest form

    of current: Blue

    moving through blue;

    blue through purple;

    the objects of desire

    opening upon themselves

    without us ;

    the objects of faith.

    The way things work

    is by solution,

    resistance lessened or

    increased and taken

    advantage of.

    The way things work

    is that we finally believe

    they are there,

    common and able

    to illustrate themselves.

    Wheel, kinetic flow,

    rising and falling water,

    ingots, levers and keys,

    I believe in you,

    cylinder lock, pully,

    lifting tackle and

    Crane lift your small head—

    I believe in you—

    your head is the horizon to

    my hand. I believe

    forever in the hooks.

    The way things work

    is that eventually

    something catches.

    I WAS TAUGHT THREE

    names for the tree facing my window

    almost within reach, elastic

    with squirrels, memory banks, homes.

    Castagno took itself to heart, its pods

    like urchins clung to where they landed

    claiming every bit of shadow

    at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days,

    nervous in taffeta gowns,

    whispering, on the verge of being

    anarchic, though well bred.

    And then chestnut, whipped pale and clean

    by all the inner reservoirs

    called upon to do their even share of work.

    It was not the kind of tree

    got at by default—imagine that—not one

    in which only the remaining leaf

    was loyal. No, this

    was all first person, and I

    was the stem, holding within myself the whole

    bouquet of three,

    at once given and received: smallest roadmaps

    of coincidence. What is the idea

    that governs blossoming? The human tree

    clothed with its nouns, or this one

    just outside my window promising more firmly

    than can be

    that it will reach my sill eventually, the leaves

    silent as suppressed desires, and I

    a name among them.

    WHORE'S BATH

    But the water will not undress me, and where its coins on my body

    accumulate,

    the sun builds its church, the soap its

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