Currents (2022) – Description & Reviews

Currents encompasses land, sea, and sky. The cosmic instinct of these poems is to lift themselves from the page as it explores within the silence and white space, found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Earthly and sensual tensions live beneath the poems, moving feverishly toward dreams, myth, and madness. The poems stretch towards the unexpected, resulting in the reader having to “work to undress” the poems amongst a landscape within the construct of deep imagery. This collection of poems is strangely brave, while it beautifully and consciously submerges into desire, vulnerability, and loss in order to face survival. The psychological nature of the poems, seen and unseen, is a fearless navigation within the outer dimensions of the abstract, while it intentionally cascades toward the magical, and ultimately, charts courses straight into the headwinds of mortality and beyond.

Reviews

Maxine Hong Kingston, recipient of the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

“Pilar Christiana Graham’s poetry is the music of mermaids singing. Following their currents, we hear silences, and we hear sounds. We’re taken to sea-places. And now and again, we land. Beautiful. True.”

~~~

Marisol Baca, Author of Tremor, Poet Laureate 2019 – 2021

https://marisol-baca.squarespace.com

Graham discovers in the quiet moments of these poems, something of herself. This collection of poems is deeply internal and reflective. There is work with repetition. The poems call back and forth the larger themes and also some surprising smaller ones like that of pressing – bar of ink to stone – and the grind, or the glass rectangle of a microscope slide. I wanted to sit in silence to imagine the crack and squeak of that little glass breaking. The poems are broken and mended in the reading. Here, an accident or an intentional sliding of glass to learn to see the minutiae, and then a thump to wake us up with shock:

“Look for her, with microscope in hand. Glass slides press on mother’s spit; this is life inside the colors,[…]”

“An imprint of a bird is on my window. It smashed its body, thump! Feathers have flattened between me and glass. Outside there is nothing dead found, only me.”

This is what it was like for me to read Currents, I was moving to an internal rhythm –the water, the boat, the hills, and hollows –rise and fall. And it is part travel notes – the places skipped and noticed, for a glance. Graham writes about locals and meanderings, moving, becoming lost: “There are different ways to drift, all which require my full attention.”

There is drive in water and the vessels of water but this is not a destination, this is an end. This is not reciprocity, this is reaching out to nothing –. Graham observes keenly how the loss takes its toll, and with plenty of warnings. And the body rectifying itself from loss, the detritus of our habits and rituals – the vacuum as metaphor for space and distance, the tissue as symbol for sky and moving upward:

“At the church, I empty the wastebaskets, in counseling rooms, carry bags of tissue clouds, and toss a white sky into the dumpster[.]”

This is where I find myself in her poetry, part rhythm, part image, and ultimately I see through the clarity of her lines like a narrative crusted over with sea salt. Currents is something to read, to sense, and to witness:

“Coral reefs are ancient inhabitants of the sea. These ancient reefs, thousands of years old, have become skeletons in an underwater graveyard. Some Internet searches inquire if it’s still worth it, and if it’s still something one should take the time to see.”