Overlord

Jorie Graham

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham's latest offering focuses on World War II-- specifically Operation Overlord, what we know today as D-Day (the storming of Omaha Beach). When Graham stays on point and concrete, as she does in a good portion of the book, this is good, solid work. Not Pulitzer material, perhaps, but fine poetry all the same. The poems are both on point and concrete in roughly the first half of the book and for a while at the very end. It is the section in between that undercuts the book, where Graham's poems devolve into vague pieces riddled with value-judgments or unpoetic relatings of things of great importance we're supposed to care about. And when someone writes the poem worth reading about forwarding chain emails and signing online petitions (and how horrid must it be to find out you've committed to paper actions that show you've been duped into thinking something of utter worthlessness-- not the cause she's talking about, but the signing of an online petition about it-- is important?), I'd like to read it.

The first poems here and the last poems here make this worth reading, though.