The Personal Trauma That Is History

Aacricai HtVRW The Personal Trauma That Is History Patrick Pritchett Overlord Jorie Graham Ecco Press http://www.harpercollins.com 112 pages; cloth, $22.95 Jorie Graham sets her fever-pitch poems at the seam where the human undergoes the traumatic subduction of history. She writes as if oblivion were always imminent, indeed, as ifat each moment nothing less than everything were at stake. Overlord, her ninth full collection, bears many of her signature concerns: how the happenstance of the ordinary produces the shiver of the uncanny; the imperative to look ever more deeply into the ethical knot that is seeing; and how that seeing asks us to address history's hurts, its longing for messianic redemption . The poems in Overlord continue Graham's intense examination ofthe continuing Shockwave that is "the phase after history," as the title of one of her earlier poems has it, but in a more explicit, direct, and even heartbreaking way than before. To achieve this shift, the ecstatic charge of her language, with its pell-mell, serpentine lines, has become somewhat muted, though scarcely minimized. The rhetorical optics capable of mixing a wide-angle metaphysical shot with the most intimate close-up is still very much in evidence. Nothing less will serve the poet's interrogation of history, which here is taken up as an ongoing trauma, both personal and collective, that refuses to be integrated into the usual narrative and lyric structures. Overlord attests to and amplifies Cathy Caruth's well-known observation that "history, like trauma, is never simply one's own...history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas." But the best poems in Overlord are far from a mere adjunct to recent trauma theory. For Graham, historical trauma provides us with the opportunity to recognize, as Jean-Luc Nancy expresses it, that presence itself "is impossible except as copresence." Graham's "big hunger" for modernism's large scope places her, along with Anne Waldman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in a small company of contemporary poets working to put the ambit back in ambition. Yet with a difference. The poem that wishes to tackle history may no longer afford either the plaintive cri de coeur for a lost order, à la Eliot, or the bullheaded incitements for utopia on the installment plan, as with Pound. The book's title wraps the code name for the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 into a series of prayers that appeal to and resist the notion of divine agency. Much of the tension in the book springs from the ways in which Graham plays these meanings off one another, complicating our sense of them, and, finally, of history itself, which functions as a kind of overlord or master discourse. As elegy, the poems in Overlord recall the dead of Normandy through the shadow of 9/1 1 and Iraq, achieving their work of mourning through a disarmingly straightforward and deeply affecting procedure. The three poems that form the core ofthe book, all entitled "Spoken from the Hedgerows"—as ifto emphasize by repetition the ghostliness oftheir utterances— are masterful collages of the voices of American soldiers involved in the Normandy invasion. Culled from various memoirs, the voices transcend the collage form, resonating with eerie affect— placid and crystalline transmissions from a vast archive of duty, strife, and suffering: I was Floyd West ( 1 st Division) I was born in Portia Arkansas Feb 6 1919 Wc went through Reykjavik Iceland through the North Atlantic through the wolf packs That was 1 942 I was Don Whitsitt I flew a B-26 medium bomber Number 131657 called the Mississippi Mudcat.... The cumulative effect of these three poems is intense : "I do not know who I am, but I am here, I tell you this," writes Graham, offering not simply a dramatic point of view, but a deep inventory of the need to attest. "I do not know why I speak to you," says Graham at the close of the second Hedgerow poem. The rest of Overlord seeks to supply a series of tentative answers, each of them speaking to the book's underlying theme: utterance's desire to escape itself— but into what? Herpoetics...