160 Poetry for Students
Region of Unlikeness,takes its name from a pas-
sage from the Confessions of St. Augustine.
Throughout the volume Graham, like Augustine,
mediates on the difference between the physical
world and the unknowable world of God. But
where Augustine’s jumping-off point is his own
sensual experiences of the world, Graham’s is the
broader world of human experience and of history.
Graham’s comfort in European settings is a es-
sential element of the poems in Region of Unlike-
nessand of “The Hiding Place” in particular. Gra-
ham grew up in France and Italy and spent much
of her childhood surrounded by the religious and
artistic artifacts of those two countries. As a child,
she says, she played in the churches of Rome; the
churches’ mosaics and sculptures and paintings
were a part of her play. But “The Hiding Place,”
like a number of other poems in Region of Unlike-
ness,is less about that aspect of European culture
than it is about the chaotic, often violent events of
the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1960s, Western Europe underwent many
dramatic social transformations. World War II left
Europe in shambles, but the two decades follow-
ing the war brought the non-Communist half of the
continent economic development almost unparal-
leled in its history. Countries such as Italy that had
been poor and undeveloped at the end of the war
were now prosperous. As a result, those countries’
populations began to become accustomed to com-
forts they had never known. The young generation
chafed under the old structures of family, religion,
and government that had been put in place in the
lean years after the war, and began to demand so-
cietal reforms.
1968 was the year in which the student-led un-
rest in Europe exploded. In Italy, Marxist students
led strikes at universities and occupied the univer-
sity of Rome. Even Communist Eastern Europe was
affected, for in Czechoslovakia the “Prague
Spring,” a gradual loosening of the Communist
strictures on expression, was in progress. But Paris
was the location for the event that came to define
“the 1960s” in European minds. In May of 1968,students in Parisian universities went on strike to
demand structural changes in the higher education
system. Soon, they were joined in their strike by
union members. The strikes turned violent and
fighting in the streets of Paris ensued. In the end,
the government of General Charles de Gaulle, who
was the very representation of the French nation
during World War II, fell. With the end of de
Gaulle’s government and the Gaullist party’s dom-
inance of French national life, France could now
move beyond the aftermath of World War II.
Graham was in Paris for the strike, and the
events and incidents of “The Hiding Place” come
from her experiences there. Whether the “I” of the
poem is actually her, whether the details she nar-
rates are “true” in the strictest sense of the word,
are not in themselves important. The details ring
true, and the narrator—whether Graham or a stand-
in for her—recounts her story in the breathless,
sense-impression-laden way of someone who has
lived through a traumatic, chaotic, and large-scale
upheaval. This is history seen from the ground
level, not history told by a historian. The poem
draws two kinds of distinctions: the most impor-
tant distinction is between the world of physical be-
ing and the unknowable “being” of God, whose na-
ture cannot be expressed in human language.
Graham introduces these themes in the book’s fore-
word.
But in the poem, she also calls attention to reg-
isters of human language, and provides two kinds
of voices. In the first stanza, Graham distinguishes
the world as she saw it from the world as explained
by those who stand apart from the events. Her per-
sonal impressions dominate the poem in sentences
full of concrete nouns and adjectives. But the first
stanza is in the language of one who is not involved;
the description is abstract, bloodless. The poet uses
italics to highlight the words of public rhetoric—
negotiations, workers, students, disturbances, con-
cessions. These are the words that newscasters and
the leaders of each side would use, and Graham,
interested in the complications inherent in using
language to describe sensory impressions, alludes
to “language floating everywhere above the sleep-
ing bodies.” Language, especially the language of
abstract nouns, is separate from experience.
After the first three stanzas, though, this reg-
ister of public rhetoric is lost, and the reader is im-
mersed fully in the language of sensory impression
for a while. The poem calmly and frankly describes
the scene in a crowded jail cell, attempting to show
the reader how such abstract nouns and conceptsThe Hiding PlaceThis is history seen
from the ground level, not
history told by a historian.”