46 contemporary poetry
references the classical narrative of Penelope’s wait for her husband
Odysseus. Traditionally associated with faithfulness and patience,
Penelope in order to defl ect her suitors devises a delaying tactic.
Penelope uses as an excuse the need to complete a burial shroud
for her elderly father-in-law, Laertes, before she can contemplate
her suitors’ advances. She weaves by day and unpicks her work at
night. Split into twenty-three separate sections, many of which
comprise only a single line of verse or a couple of words, Graham’s
self-portrait uses the motif of weaving and unthreading as a textual
game of survival which emerges as the poem progresses. Graham
describes in her opening: ‘the fl itting shadows the postponement
/ working her fi ngers into the secret place, the place of what is
coming undone’ (p. 48 ). The self-portrait enables three intersect-
ing and synchronous narratives to coexist. On one level we are
given Penelope’s story but at points Odysseus’s actions enter the
frame, ‘the here and the there, in which he wanders searching’
(p. 49 ), as well as the self-portraiture of the artist and poet at work.
Using the analogy of Penelope’s loom Graham sees comparatives
of detail in the weaving and unthreading which takes place in
her own writing, what she refers to as ‘the story and its undoing’
(p. 48 ).
A fascination with lacunae, gaps and unthreading is also mir-
rored by other poems in The End of Beauty. In ‘Pollock and Canvas’
Graham places her focus on Jackson Pollock’s abstract expression-
ism and action paintings; a process which she describes as ‘choos-
ing to no longer let the brushtip touch / at any point / the still
ground’ (p. 81 ). This movement is described moreover as retaining
action, creating a ‘hovering – keeping the hands off – the gap alive’
(p. 83 ). In an interview Graham has suggested how acts of failure,
even the failure of language to match the world, are a necessary part
of creativity:
I need to feel the places where the language fails as much as
one can. Silence which is awe or astonishment the speech
ripped out of you... I’d like to think you can feel by its
accurate failures, the forces pressing against the sentence, the
time order... From the labyrinthine ritual cave paintings of
the Stone Age, through every period of human time, when we