Precisely because the war and climate change are on everyone’s lips, they are particularly recalcitrant to the imagination. The “sea change” noted with alarm here is a speeding-up, without apparent hindrance, of natural process, so that we feel that we are being pursued, like the dream-Arab of Wordsworth’s Prelude, by “the fleet waters of a drowning world.” And finally, the conviction that “you have/no rightful way//to live” wells up painfully in late middle age for a poet who remembers the idealism of adolescence, the hope invested in family life, and the uncertain imaginative project of fallible poetry. Every poet knows the impossibility of writing public rhetoric as such without personal imagination, but how is one to imagine oneself actively into a distant war as both invader and victim? The fear that “you have/no rightful way//to live” arises as well for Graham as for any citizen when contemplating our overconsumption of exhaustible natural resources. Any writer must wonder what to say when facing so many lives extirpated or damaged by our preemptive strike, so many conscienceless acts reported day by day.

The apprehension springs in part from restless guilt concerning the ongoing American war, undertaken in our name by an elected president and an elected Congress. This is the apprehension hovering behind Jorie Graham’s new volume of poems, Sea Change.

One wild moment torrent