Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Book Reviews
Yet he carries them with him
With a certain affection. Some nights,
Dark and drunk, he smiles to think of his grandfathers
Arm wrestling within him. The farmer wins, of course,
But the banker has foreclosure capped
Inside his fountain pen.
For the poem’s speaker, becoming like these men is an inevitability.
“What’s good about getting older?” he asks, “You turn into men you
thought you’d never know / While the world yammers on around
you / Hilarious and hysterical.” It’s a tough burden to carry, one that
imbues Graham’s poems with their significant and turbulent heft.
Yet there is another side to A World Without End, a tender and elegiac
one. In the book’s second section, shorter lyrics provide testimony to
the delicate balance of a long-term relationship, demonstrating through
a curt and clipped diction how a couple can survive “the steaming
salvage yard of marriage.” There are no easy answers to this dilemma,
only small consolations, like in the poem “Anniversary”:
There are more stars than we remember and I rename
The constellations: Cadillac de Ville, Hoover Upright, Man
Reluctantly Losing All He Loves. She sighs
And leans into the rail, stars in her hair and I spill
Styrofoamed coffee all over my hands.
Just hold me, she says,
And I do.
The speaker’s romantic tendernesses are countered here by a weary
yet poetic cynicism—renaming stars after cars and appliances, then
admitting, albeit reluctantly, what he feels slipping away. These poems
are painful, but they ring true in their abrupt sparseness.
Poems in the book’s third and fourth sections take us further
afield from the poet’s personal history into a greater brand of American
history: unexplored small-town Indiana, Gettysburg, the after-effects
of Vietnam, Americans abroad in Ireland and Italy, and the dolor of
the classroom, where students in the poem “Offices,” unreachable and
unteachable, shrug off Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”:
One kid suggests that maybe Robert
Didn’t like his father very much
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