‘Notice All That Disappears’

The urgency of the poet as messenger animates Graham’s new collection, To 2040, her tenth since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Its poems address the demise of the world—the vase of blossoms on the table, the tree from which they came, even the human mind attending to them—which has provided poetry with so much of its material and its source of power. Imagine, they say to the desolate future, how this world once existed, how we once lived alongside other species. They exhort us, her readers in the present, to “look behind you, turn, look down as much as you can, notice all / that disappears.”