[To] The Last [Be] Human

by Jorie Graham, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction)

Overview

[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…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596605
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	663,695
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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. 

Read an Excerpt

Poem

The earth said

remember me.

The earth said

don’t let go,

 

said it one day

when I was 

accidentally

listening, I

 

heard it, I felt it

like temperature,

All said in a 

whisper—build to-

 

morrow, make right be-

fall, you are not

free, other scenes

are not taking

 

place, time is not filled,

time is not late, there is

a thing the emptiness

needs as you need

 

emptiness, it 

shrinks from light again &

again, although all things

are present, a

 

fact a day a 

bird that warps the

arithmetic of per-

fection with its

 

arc, passing again &

again in the evening 

air, in the pre-

vailing wind, making no

 

mistake—yr in-

difference is yr

principal beauty

the mind says all the

 

time—I hear it—I

hear it every-

where. The earth

said remember

 

me. I am the 

earth it said. Re-

member me.

 

 

Tree

Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it

choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades,

and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to me the

perfect one, the ready one, it is permitted, it is possible, it is

 

actual. The VR glasses are not needed yet, not for now, no, not for this while

longer. And it is warm in my cupped palm. And my fingers close round but not too

fast. Somewhere wind like a hammerstroke slows down and lengthens

endlessly. Closer-in the bird whose coin-toss on a metal tray never stills to one

 

face. Something is preparing to begin again. It is not us. Shhh say the spreading sails of

cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold and we are wrapped in day and hoisted

up, all the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening

harness of sound—some gnats nearby, a fly where the white milk-drop of the

 

torn stem starts. Dust on the eglantine skin, white powder in the confetti of light

all up the branches, truth, sweetness of blood-scent and hauled-in light, withers of

the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit is torn from its dream. Remain I

think backing away from the trembling into full corrosive sun. Momentary blindness

 

follows. Correction. There are only moments. They hurt. Correction. Must I put down

here that this is long ago. That the sky has been invisible for years now. That the ash

of our fires has covered the sun. That the fruit is stunted yellow mold when it appears

at all and we have no produce to speak of. No longer exists. All my attention is

 

free for you to use. I can cast farther and farther out, before the change, a page turned,

we have gone into another story, history floundered or one day the birds dis-

appeared. The imagination tried to go here when we asked it to, from where I hold the

fruit in my right hand, but it would not go. Where is it now. Where is this here where

 

you and I look up trying to make sense of the normal, turn it to life, more life,

disinterred from desire, heaved up onto the dry shore awaiting the others who could

not join us in the end. For good. I want to walk to the left around this tree I have made

again. I want to sit under it full of secrecy insight immensity vigor bursting complexity

 

swarm. Oh great forwards and backwards. I never felt my face change into my new

face. Where am I facing now. Is the question of good still stinging the open before us

with its muggy destination pitched into nothingness? Something expands in you

where it wrenches-up its bright policing into view—is this good, is this the good—

 

under the celebrating crowd, inside the silences it forces hard away all round itself,

where chanting thins, where we win the war again, made thin by bravery and belief,

here’s a polaroid if you want, here’s a souvenir, here now for you to watch unfold, up

close, the fruit is opening, the ribs will widen now, it is all seed, reddish foam, history.

 

The Sure Place

Outside the window this morning, I reach to it, the newest

extension, here at second story, of the wisteria vine—

the tenth summer’s growth,

the August 13th portion of,

the rootball planted when still

the mother of a new child,

one almost tired-looking very silent out-arriving

tendril—what kind of energy is this in my hands,

this tress of glucose and watery scribbling—something which cannot reach

conclusion, my open palm just under it,

the outermost question being asked me by the world today—

it is weak it is exactly the right weakness—

we have other plans for your life says the world—

wind coming from below with the summery tick in it,

where it rounds and tucks-up from fullness where it allows one to hear

the rattling in the millions of now-drying seedpods

hanging in the trees off the walls under the hedges,

every leaf has other plans for you say the minutes also the seconds also the tiniest

fractions of whatever atoms make this a hot breezeless day,

in which what regards the soul is what it has given back

(when the sky is torn)(when the seas are poured forth)

the wisteria in my hand: who made it, who made it right,

what does it know of the day of reckoning, is today its day—

I could pull it, my vine, down, I could rip it out—still

no day of reckoning—the day it is said when no soul

can help another—each is alone—the unseen will say do not hoard me—

do not—as I hold its tether in the morning-light slant—

as the horizon does not seem to hoard the unseen—

so also the ideas are not emptied, look I am holding one—

shall we say that this instant is the end of time

where I raise my hand into the advancing morning

where the dawn-cool lifts to let the stillness of midday be seen

here underneath these low-flowing mists

which all the long time are still and waiting

for that one heat that will not change its face,

even when the horsemen ride up and it is time, and the face of the heat

stays, shimmers-stays, and the knives of the day turn blade-out

in the long corridor of noon which comes looking for this tendril—

and I hold it tight to the stone

as I bring the string round it

not to crush the sucrose and glucose in it but still

to hold it back that the as yet unformed blossoms

that would channel up it might channel up it

coming finally to spawn in long grapelike drooping

which the bees next month—what is that—will come to inhabit,

a slowness which is exactly the right slowness,

and I tell you I can feel in it that one crisp thought

which I must find a way to fix

upon this wall, driving a nail in now, and then a length of string,

around which to wrap this new growth, for it to cling to and surpass

so that next week when I look again it will have woven round its few more times

and grown hairy in its clinging and gotten to a new length

which we will be called upon to tie back, new knot, new extension,

to the next-on nail yet further up

on what remains on what’s left of this wall.

 

 

The Hiddenness of the World

 

The lovers disappear into the woods again. The war is

on. The blizzard on, in its own way. Also many interpretations

on their way—of fascism, of transcendence, of what you mean by

perhaps when you look at me that way. A minute more and then a

minute more you look. And then? And then—everything would have been

different. But the lovers are in the woods again, the signifier is in

 

the woods, the revolution of the ploughshare in, clod-crumble in, cloud-

tumble, hope and its stumble in—everything would have been, could

 

have been different—do you not think—and the war still on—and

would you have gone—could you spare an arm, an eye, a foot is a thing

one hopes to keep, one’s stop and go, one’s step, one’s only way

which could have been another way, but wasn’t. Do I have to end

in order to begin, I ask the light that lingers on the trees—between the

trees—the lovers have disappeared into again. I cannot breathe. This verge

is taking up all of my life—is it my time or space, I cannot tell—this being here but then

not here, trying to suss out all the fundamental laws—like sniffing-in the day I

think—the human laws, the commonalities we call our word-to-word thing, our

love—what else shall I think—that emotions have no significance? life no validity?

We’re going to see a movie later on. There is a terrible thing inside of me.

It must not grow. I can hear my own scared space apologizing now to every

thing. Like a lightning bolt come when a blizzard was expected. It looks

expensive in the sky. Breaks nothing but still whacks us like a stick,

hissing you must forget organic life, your little dagger of right/

wrong, your leprosy of love, of hate, of all such local temporary wonders. The lovers

are taking their time I think. The storm appears above the woods like a radio

left on in an abandoned car. Are they apologizing now, again, to the earth,

are they wishing they could stop and hide—let’s be the lucky ones that don’t

go out again—are they standing terrified in their Jerusalem of knowing things, of

things, a couple of lucky ducks, blood flowing normally though maybe a little

fast, because of all the promises that must be made, so fast, my arm, my name,

I swear I’ll never tell, all the impending before the ambulance of the outside

arrives to touch them when the last trees are surpassed and nothing but

this clearing’s left. The light is hammering down its thousand

fists. From war it looks like blossoming. It’s forcing the green fuse. It’s synthesizing

lapse. The huge wild oleanders sway. It all awaits this temporary race—run

run—our race—the great fires seeping deep into this thinnest moment from the

only now—why don’t they wake us—no—we want to sleep—the lovers in the

movie of the woods, I see them from my inner life, I see skin slip, light reach, face scar

itself with time, hair burn, leaf throne itself, and nothing turn, brush, sweat—the fire,

the now—it screams at us year after year—each day so sweet—almost a

duplicate, unnerving us, celestial us, looking everywhere in day for the origins of,

the hidden part of, the natural—wrong search—wrong fires—nothing will be done in

time—no one wishes to become—preparedness is dull—such thirst for this delay,

 

this looking away, this sanity—the lovers in the woods, really in the outside now—un-

bounded delirium, abstraction, hidden real, dark realm—have no more access to

the day.... But could it be more beautiful. The wind has dropped. Two cardinals play

in the young oak. They slip and rise. In distance, bells. Wind then no wind. A previous

life, a hummingbird, has found the agapanthus there. It always does. Its blossom

always blossoms just in time. Either nothing is alone. Or everything. You are alone in

the alone. To exit the human is to exit the singular, the plural, the collective, the

dream. The woods have an entrance. From where I watch I do not think I’ll see them

exit who went in, here at the start, the only start, we are filtering them out, are leaving them

in dark, in hiddenness, all excess, all sincerity. Don’t touch. In the

flamboyant interim, burn. Feel this outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in my head.

You. You in me in this final time. My shadow. Haunted. Organic. Temporary.

Table of Contents

To the Last Be Human xv

Introduction Robert Macfarlane

Sea Change

I

Sea Change 3

Embodies 6

This 8

Guantánamo 10

Underworld 12

Futures 14

II

Later in Life 19

Just Before 22

Loan 24

Summer Solstice 27

Full Fathom 30

The Violinist at the Window, 1918 32

III

Nearing Dawn 37

Day Off 40

Positive Feedback Loop 42

Belief System 45

Root End 48

Undated Lullaby 51

No Long Way Round 54

Place

I

Sundown 61

Cagnes Sur Mer 1950 64

Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of the Field) 67

Untitled 71

The Bird on My Railing 74

II

End 81

On The Virtue of the Dead Tree 84

Dialogue (Of the Imagination's Fear) 87

Employment 90

Treadmill 92

III

Of Inner Experience 97

Torn Score 100

The Sure Place 103

Although 105

IV

The Bird That Begins It 111

Lull 114

Waking 117

The Future of Belief 120

Earth 123

V

Lapse 129

Message from Armagh Cathedral 2011 133

Fast

I

Ashes 141

Honeycomb 142

Deep Water Trawling 144

Self Portrait at Three Degrees 146

Shroud 148

from the Enmeshments 150

We 152

Fast 155

II

Reading to My Father 161

The Post Human 164

The Medium 166

Vigil 171

With Mother in the Kitchen 174

Dementia 177

III

To Tell of Bodies Changed to Different Forms 183

Self Portrait: May I Touch You 186

Incarnation 188

From Inside the MRI 194

Prying 198

CRYO 203

IV

Double Helix 209

The Mask Now 214

Mother's Hands Drawing Me 218

Runway

I

All 227

Tree 230

I'm Reading Your Mind 232

My Skin Is 234

When Overfull Of Pain I 236

Overheard in the Herd 238

II

[To] The Last [Be] Human 243

From The Transience 246

Prayer Found Under Floorboard 248

Carnation/Re-In 250

Becoming Other 252

Thaw 254

Exchange 257

III

Sam's Dream 263

Sam's Standing 267

Whereas I Had Not Yet In This Life Seen 270

Rail 272

I Won't Live Long 274

Scarcely There 277

Un- 280

IV

The Hiddenness of the World 287

Runaway 290

It Cannot Be 294

Whom Are You 296

Siri U 298

In The Nest® 300

The Wake Off the Ferry 305

Poem 306

Acknowledgments 309

About the Author 311

Editorial Reviews

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

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