Title: Veils and Blank Spaces
Product review: SWARM is a complicated work to figure out: it frustrates, it antagonizes. This is precisely why we shouldn't dismiss it as an attempt simply to "baffle" lovers of poetry.True enough: hardly any of the poems are palpable. Rather, most of them resist palpability. Read aloud, the poems, with their blank spaces and sporadic dashes, remind us of Emily Dickinson's poems. How, though, do we begin to make sense of her abstractions and unusual imagery? Essentially, readers must extract Graham's primary metaphors (i.e. veils, unrequited love, creativity, history, seasonal change and so on). Understanding how these metaphors and images are woven into SWARM's overall tapestry is one possible approach to understanding the volume as a whole. Firm believers that poetry is an evolving art will surely wish to read and appreciate SWARM.
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