Jorie Graham

Judges’ Citation

A question that by sparing its question mark assumes all the weight of an irrefutable and relentless answer (‘Are we extinct yet.’) lures us into Jorie Graham’s To 2040, a moving and unsettling vision of an imminent future, of a present already on the brink of perdition, yet at the same time a declaration of love to a world that will cease to exist or, if it continues to be, then without us to laud it.

A question that by sparing its question mark assumes all the weight of an irrefutable and relentless answer (‘Are we extinct yet.’) lures us into Jorie Graham’s To 2040, a moving and unsettling vision of an imminent future, of a present already on the brink of perdition, yet at the same time a declaration of love to a world that will cease to exist or, if it continues to be, then without us to laud it. In this most tender of apocalyptic poems, doing without the outworn images of doom and only hinting at a strange rising sun, at gold that ‘seems chipped from / what used to be Venice’ (and at illness, the frailty of the body), Graham encourages us to listen, to look, to stand still, to marvel and deplore while we still can: ‘the stream. It is a temple. It is / rushing. How could we / not have heard.’ With lines of great brevity and mobility, leading up to and culminating in a coda of utmost sensuality, in the intense portrait of a long-awaited rain almost tangible on the reader’s face, we are invited to ponder the bloom and the losses, the natural phenomena and their anything-but-commonness, encountering the light and ‘the distance in it – its howling – its gigantic / memory’ as well as a raven whose ‘coat / is sun’. A superb elegy, as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking, a virtuoso plea for curiosity and care, admonition and celebration at once.