Product Description

The New York Times has said that "Jorie Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have," and this new collection is a reminder of how startling, original, and deeply relevant her poetry is. In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of continuing injury and damage done, and the realization that the existence of a "future" itself may no longer be assured?

Customer Reviews (3)

based solely on expectations
I was prompted to read Jorie Graham's poetry because she hasbeen championed by Helen Vendler for so long, and so passionately.I am someone who has read and loved poetry for almost 50 years, and I have been inspired by the continuous reinvention of the form which time inevitably brings to all the arts.Which is why I was somewhat shockingly underwhelmed by Sea Change.But I'm not one to give up easily, and I went back and read the last three of her books, and in each I sensed the same "look-at-me" pose behind the poems: which is to say, look more at the person who wrote the poem (and attach whatever name you like) than at the poem that was written.

A Lovely Work by an AmericanMaster
This is a lovely work by an American Master Poet at the height of her powers. From the first poem to last, one gets the sensation of beauty under siege, of what it means to have all that we consider essential to our wellbeing threatened and overwhelmed.

Ms. Graham employs a new visual format to show the stark dichotomy between our passions and the necessities of life in a world overstressed. Her new work "Sea Change" at once lyrically predicts and urgently decries our imperiled shared future.
Well worth the read.

A shattered music
Whereas the pleasures of The Errancy and Never are both myriad and readily apparent, this book's charmsare a little more slippery. Beginning with its much-discussed form (alternating left-justified long lines with center-justified short ones) making for a sometimes-maddening read, Sea Change makes some very obvious efforts to differentiate itself from previous Graham books. Gone are the endlessly enfolding and pulsing parenthetical musings that exhausted some of Never's longer works. Also gone are any variation in form. The line positions described above are the only form present. That said, the poems themselves cover a typically broad range of movement. I hesitate to say "subjects" because I feel that Graham often operates on the plane of not-knowing, where to posit a singular is to be distracted by nature's awe.

The poems here address the world at crisis. Sometimes, as better readers than I have pointed out, they seem to address directly a future populace, one unaware of the state of emergency that we found ourselves in so many years back (into our present). And so "presence" itself becomes a theme, as it does for most of Graham's post-Erosion work. "I cannot look a the world hard enough," Graham has said in a recent interview. Certainly, there are gorgeous lyrics about nature's susceptibility to pressure, or even observance. Graham seems perfectly content to describe a world that shies at the presence of a viewer. Sight is no longer true enough; thought no longer ample. "Sea Change," "This," "Full Fathom, "Positive Feedback Loop," "Undated Lullaby" and "Root End" all play thrillingly with the state of the natural world at the cusp of irreversible change in the presence of a speaker who can't quite capture it. They feature her signature blend of crisp diction with a humble reluctance to try to pin down descriptions with mere words. The uncertain fascinates Graham beautifully and wrenchingly.

This should be one of Graham's more straightforward works. It is not. My only complaint about it so far is that its theme seems so closely related to Never's, that of the environment on precarious balance against the forces that want to ruin it. That book saw some of Graham's best writing to date ["Prayer," "Gulls," "Philosopher's Stone," "Evolution (How Old Are You?)"], but this one feels less open to outright pleasure. Maybe this is intentional: in one poem, it is brought to our attention that fish are dying along the Great Barrier Reef, and a plum tree in France has blossomed out of season. Where Never was rife with description and reassessment, this book functions strongly on reportage, something Graham has let influence her work following the seminal and difficult Swarm.

I look forward to a move away from the political. I think one of our best writers forcing thoughts of world crisis upon us makes us lose some of the vast cultural commentary that has been such a solid staple of her earlier work. And surely it is not fair to accuse her of repeating herself, but on the whole, the book feels like a rehash of Never's grandest themes. In the end, the book makes constant use of the (in)famous questions regarding whether poetry and politics can be joined (or separated, depending on the argument).

In the meantime I will keep reading (the alternating line lengths practically beg this of the reader) and reading any comments that may appear, so that I can try to get a better grip on this latest by one of my all-time favorites. ... Read more

Product Description

The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

Customer Reviews (10)

The downhill slide of a once-great poet.
Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems 1974-1994 (Ecco, 1995)

I love Jorie Graham's early work, the wunderkind poems of the seventies that established her as a real force in the world of poetry. Good, solid imagist stuff that tells its tale and gets out:

"...I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on

black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly."
("I Watched a Snake")

A book like this, on the other hand, that goes from the very beginnings of her career to the most recent stuff she'd done at the time shows the journey from that exciting young poet to someone who's gone so far off the rails that one's not terribly sure what to do with her stuff any more. First, the showing stopped and the telling started. Then the experiments (I assume they're experiments) in repetition began. Then came the leaving out of words, or the substitutions of "x" for various nouns. The end result is the long, rambling, boring pieces that make up the latter half of this book.

"Consisting of fountains, yes, but invisible, no?
And of what we spoke of in the dead of _________ once long ago.
And of long ago.
And of the fountains too, no?..."
("Untitled")

(note, as well, these are the only lines in the poem that rhyme.)

Instead of this, I'd suggest picking up the first two books material from this compilation is taken from (Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion), which are both wonderful. As for the rest... well, if the excerpt above didn't drive you nuts, go from there. **

How (much) do I love this book? How?
Starting with her splendid beginnings as a voice so uniquely visual that it could only later obsess her, The Dream begins with an explanation of The Way Things Work
and descends (travels sideways and expands like interstellar gas)
into the full-throttle Graham of the middle period,
long lines,
huge gusts of philosophy and sight,
and of course her ever-evolving attempts to cut into cross-sections of the silences air holds and which we bend to try to understand.
This being said, Graham is NOT a poet to be understood in the full sense. Though not as much like Ashbery's word collages as some people like to claim (at least I don't think), her writing certainly benefits from repeated readings. I'm still tramping through the title poem, and have only very recently come to appreciate her next whole (non-collective) book, The Errancy, as a full thing, almost incapable of being dissected into "selections from."
I'm anxious to see what Ecco has in store for her Selected II, which with the recent release of Overlord: Poems, must be coming soon.
In the meantime I will continue to enjoy the eyes of
the most visual poet I've ever seen.

Also, and as a side note, I am very surprised by the exclusion of the poem "To a Friend Going Blind," from Erosion. It's one of her absolute best.

This book works in perfect concordance with the next book she wrote, The Errancy, my favorite of her single volumes.

Evoluting and Grahamesque
After reading and re-reading this collection, the first thought that crossed my mind was, "I want something magnificent to happen to me today!"I felt myself dissolving from today and re-emerging into a mythical tomorrow, where words and phrases would be coins of the realm.Graham is the owner magic; spellbinding and lucid and yet swirling together the elements of The Actual and The Figurative; hybrids of each other, till the eventuality of their meanings and intents just simply trade places!Graham's poems are the unravelling of mystery that , in the end, remain more mysterious than ever.And to live, there must always be mystery, lest our lives lose their meanings. I was not the same when I set the book down.

her most lasting book?
Since Jorie Graham is so innovative, of course she's controversial.Don't be fooled.Her books since since The Dream of the Unified Field have each been major achievements for the poet & significantly innovative for poetry; this book contains many of her most important earlier works & shows the immense development in the first 5 books of a poet for whom each book is a critical examination & leap beyond everything she has done before.This poetry is really intense.More & more, every poem is so monumental.Her mastery is undisputed.Her visionary brilliance is evident.Every creative product of hers is very major; this is perhaps the book that will be her most lasting since this is the one she got the Pulitzer Prize for.

she's not so great
while her poetry isn't the worst i've read, graham's isn't that great... her poems drag on, all could be cut by about half or even a third. she seems to forget just what the english language can do in the hands of a master, because her poems are flat and i've heard of people talking about her work being difficult. i think they confuse difficult with nothing to say. ... Read more

Product Description
T S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding the Pulitzer Prize winner as a profound voice in American poetry. Now, in her eighth collection, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.

A swarm, as Graham's notes rather immodestly inform us, is "a body of beeswhich ... leave the hive or main stock, gather in a compact mass or cluster,and fly off together in search of a new dwelling-place, under the guidanceof a queen." Accordingly, these poems find her in the process of abandoningthe tropes of mythology and religion, busily destabilizing the old forms insearch of the new. Does Graham discover her new dwelling-place? "Explain,"the imperative voice in Swarm repeatedly begs, and it's an entreatyworth heeding. Read these poems once, read them again, and you still may beno closer to an answer than you were before. --Mary Park ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

F WORD
Swarm literally kills me. not literarily, literally. I'm passionate about feats of intelligence and poetry and this is up there. I've read all of her books, my opinion shifts, but swarm is in the top tier (so crass that there should be tiers but passions have opinions). so different from the forms of her other works, this seems a distillation, a bare minimum necessary to float a story. These poems are like nets, split here an there but nonetheless ambitiously gathering-in the blank space of the page. you could throw this gauntlet down next to a heidegger or a deleuze and it would make a pretty confidant. WHEW. My only complaint is that every copy i've gotten ahold of (floppy copies all) came unbound, possibly this recommends the work? unbindable? pardon the chuckles. READ IT.

"Smarm" instead of "Swarm"
Well, that's not true. There's nothing smarmy about these poems. In fact, there's nothing to these poems at all and the people listed here who've liked the book are only fooling themselves. Indeed, claiming that they understand these poems is another way of patting themselves on the back and I would really love to see any one of Jorie's (many) sycophants write a considered, analytical paper extoling (or even making sense of) the virtues of this book. I am not an frivolous reader or a superficial one and these poems don't cut it. This is an absolutely unreadable book of poems by a poet whose entire reputation rests solely on the advocacy of lone-wolf critic Helen Vendler. These are, quite simply, bad poems. Avoid this book at all costs.

Worthy
Here's a poet worthy of that label they've slapped on her: genius.No need to be jealous, just willing to learn from her.

sure
Sure, it's extraordinary. The reason it is extraordinary is quite simple, and to do with her epigraph at the start of 'The Errancy', which is that line from Wyatt, about seeking to catch the wind in a net. Here she pushes her whimsicality, her quite irritating unpindownableness to a new limit, and succeeds quite unexpectedly. It is an achievement, after all, to be unexpected more than once. She has done it, and remains credible: this spiny, out-of-focus poet, who somehow manages to make it mean something, so close to where others fall down. A GREAT BOOK.

Again and Again and Again She Does It
It's fascinating I think that Jorie Graham's initial reviews for Swarm were rather scathing.Recently though they've warmed up to her and the book, and it is clear now critics widely consider the work an extraordinary glimpse at this master's mind and style.It's a lot different from Graham's usual, but then again Graham has made a name for herself and her interest in changing styles from book to book.I suggest sticking with it and giving it time!If you love Graham you'll love Swarm! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Interesting Illumination of the Body through Poetry

The trees grow vague,/then are/completely gone,/then stain/this world again as it/evolves/through them.

"At the Long Island Jewish Geriatric Home"

Erosion is the process of a gradual wearing away of something, which translates into many of the themes shaping Jorie Graham's "Erosion," which examines the relation of the body to death, life, faith, memory, spirituality and immortality. Most of the poems, I believe, are connected by the seeming theme of an unfortunate miscarriage experienced by the speaker in all of the poems. There are direct violent images next to subtle expressions that allude to anger, loss and trauma.

For example, "San Sepolcro" announces a protagonist who speaks of a "tragedy" that entails a "forever stillborn." From this point of view, many of the poems unfold to speak about death, nature, spirituality and memory. For instance, the above lines from "At the Long Island Jewish Geriatric Home" allows us to analyze the meaning of the trees as growing "vague," just like developing infants which"grow vague" in terms of not being able to be conceived into full fruition. Then, suddenly these trees/infants are "completely gone," or lost, but remain in memory in having to "stain," or wounding within the context of life, or in other words, in the context of "this world," or world imagined as a womb, which produces the trees/infants.

As a result, the loss of a child remains sown in the majority of the poems, in addition the theme of anger and trauma. "Kimono" and "History" are the most compelling poems that present trauma from loss in terms of motherhood and the loss and regaining of a post-Holocaust memory. Specifically, the speaker of the poems expresses: "I don't see him/my little man/no more than seven/catching his lost stitch of breath." Interpreting the poem, the feeling of loss in terms of "abstract branches" coming from a "whole" that "loosens her stays" provide clues that the speaker ponders the loss of a child only left in memory.

In addition, "History" gives a violent picture of deeds stemming from war that inevitably wipe out innocent "crumbs" that become metaphors for the innocent-relating to Holocaust survivors-imagined as "flowerpots broken" again the torrid wind of war's destruction.

Indeed Graham's poems ponder the darkness of the evil, misfortune, pain, anger and loss that affect the body as it attempts to live in a reality where pleasure, desire and love have a certain role in its organization.

This poetry collection is ideal for courses in Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Literary Studies, including Graduate Studies in Poetry.

Jorie Graham's breathtaking first real mastery of poetry
This is where she really mastered poetry, with the infinite elliptical loop & music & self-awareness & endless mysteriousness of Salmon, & in other poems playing, with great precision, with who the speaker is, & doing so much more with the book as a whole.With her first book it was clear that she would be a very special poet, & with this her second she absolutely mastered so many aspects of poetry in such a visionary way that she could confidently proceed from there to the wild avant-garde of her third book, The End of Beauty, & beyond.Reading Erosion, you can tell it's before she broke into the later experimentation she's now famous for.The style is very different.Here the lines are usually shorter; the themes are ambitious ("History" -- including but not focusing on a pitchfork opening slow holes in someone), but not as ambitious as later; the poems are shorter.But I think in poems in Erosion when she says things like "how clean the mind is" while commenting briefly on lemon skins, & elsewhere has a garment closing "from privacy to eternity" one could tell how brilliant she was & how limitless her poetry could be.It's all larger in ambition & scope than her first book.She was progressing already, as at the beginning of a parabolic curve not far out yet from the vertex.

Jorie Graham's breathtaking first real mastery of poetry
This is where she really mastered poetry, with the infinite elliptical loop & music & self-awareness & endless mysteriousness of Salmon, & in other poems playing, with great precision, with who the speaker is, & doing so much more with the book as a whole.With her first book it was clear that she would be a very special poet, & with this her second she absolutely mastered so many aspects of poetry in such a visionary way that she could confidently proceed from there to the wild avant-garde of her third book, The End of Beauty, & beyond.Reading Erosion, you can tell it's before she broke into the later experimentation she's now famous for.The style is very different.Here the lines are usually shorter; the themes are ambitious ("History" -- including but not focusing on a pitchfork opening slow holes in someone), but not as ambitious as later; the poems are shorter.But I think in poems in Erosion when she says things like "how clean the mind is" while commenting briefly on lemon skins, & elsewhere has a garment closing "from privacy to eternity" one could tell how brilliant she was & how limitless her poetry could be.It's all larger in ambition & scope than her first book.She was progressing already, as at the beginning of a parabolic curve not far out yet from the vertex.

Graham's "eroding" poetry...
EROSION, Graham's second volume of poems, is quite different from any other she has published. The poems themselves are strung elegantly like a pearl necklace. Each is quite linear in appearance and tone, crafted withclever, audible rhythms and rhymes. Most of the poems focus on a particularartist or saint or philospher--which is refreshing for those of us who boreeasily of traditional nature poetry. Taken together, the poems, like manyof those in recent book SWARM, deal with the seen & the unseen, thereal & the imagined, the actual & the conceptual. EROSION is a boldstep outward in American poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of poems by "a poet of large ambitions and reckless music. Ms. Graham writes with a metaphysical flair and emotional power".--New York Times Book Review. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

this book is heavier than lead
This Jorie Graham's 3rd book was her first time writing the huge avant-garde housed in her mind.James Tate describes her well as "staggeringly brilliant."Each word in this book spans forever in every direction.Each poem is so massive, so dense.They take a lot out of you, but they reward incredibly.Fracturing & stretching, reaching & grasping.This book is an experience.

a world of its own...
or maybe that should be "a galaxy of its own...." Every poem in this book is enormous -- dense, generally three or four pages long -- pure terrifying brilliance. This is the most terrifying book I've ever read. The poems are all that inelligent. It takes a lot from you to read it, but it gives back much more. She uses her uncompromising, undisputed formal mastery in The End of Beauty to create something necessarily avant-garde, totally unique. Flawless, utterly magnificent in every jerking twist & nuance & flare. The lines explode in myriad different diferent directions like shrapnel, shrapnel, & bring back more scope than you've ever encountered in one place before with sure victory. She knows how to show rather than tell & how to tell when there's the best way.

...The Beginning of Disovery
In THE END OF BEAUTY, Graham offers us a delicious deconstruction of our mythical histories, our culture, and our art. It puzzles me that few people--even poetry buffs--don't take to her poetry more kindly. For hardly any other contemporary poet--on this side of the Atlantic, anyway--tackles such philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic issues with as much vigor as Graham.

Graham's handling of great art and twice-told tales is refreshing in its idiosyncratic usage (and criticism) of postmodern conventions. Reading this book, one cannot fail to see the connections between Graham and Donne, Graham and Derrida, Graham and Ashbery. It's important, I think, especially for readers who fail to grasp many of her ideas, to envision Graham's poetry as part of a much greater discourse between metaphysics and history.

In "Orpheus and Eurydice," Graham retells the story of the mythological lovers, but through the eyes of Eurydice herself, as she vanishes into thin air forever. And in "Breakdancing," she splices together scenes of Saint Teresa's ecstatic prayers in Avila, and breakdancers on a city sidewalk, thus delineating the sense of a multiple reality.

The book will surely leave you with a heightened appreciation for art, as well as art's role in defining and redefining the world.

Enchantment!
When I first read through this book, my mind was set on the auto-pilot of mere linear sense, trying to get some meaning from the poems. Mistake! At a second reading, I let myself drift along with the embracing flow and onlythen did I experience the sense of Jorie's words.I thought of how I hadexperienced James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and though not comprehending thewords or even able to parse them, I began to absorb images and impressions,which became unravelled into a sort of experiencing the reality within theMusic of the words.Jorie's language is, indeed, another Music which oneingests much as one experiences an intoxicant dream. Her detractors saythat she is an elitist with language, and full of vain puffery. But they donot understand what they're seeing. Jorie's words are a wonderous andbeautiful and magical melody!

Magic.Pure magic.
Not only Jorie Graham at her best but poetry at its best.Her "Self-Portrait" series is wildly addictive.You will read and re-read these poems and never exhaust their lyric strangeness. ... Read more

Product Description

Poems exploring the theme of sexual, emotional, political, and spiritual desire through the eyes of a poet's characters examine the age in which we live, where dreams are not as easy as they once were.

The voice isfrantic. Poems start mid-sentence; thought interrupts itself,interjecting breathless re-routings and disclaimers. Graham's is atattered voice, one seeking wholeness in the latter, terrifying partof our complicated century. Included are six guardian angel poems,more like rants against the constantly craving, delusional humanmind. Graham's allusion-studded poetry is not to be hurried over butsavored, studied like sacred text. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Supernal
Although I appreciate all of Jorie Graham's books, this one, from the perspective of ten years, stands out.It is purely and simply one of the greatest books of poetry ever written in English.Every poem opens the mind to new beauties, new perspectives, and new uses of language.I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The traffic jam of the senses, of the self within history, the elements and the swarm.
"After the rain there was traffic behind us like a/ long kiss./ The ramp harrowing its mathematics like a newcomer who likes/ the rules./ Glint and whir of piloting minds, gripped/ steering-wheels..."

So begins "The Scanning," the first long poem in this intricate and hypnotic collection. The traffic becomes a running theme, as do religion ("It was this day or possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England," "Jacob waiting and the angel didn't show") plurality ("subaqueous pasturings," "the grammatical weave"), as well as certain words ("glint" is an almost tiring favorite) and less-than-concrete imagery ("[t]he soundless foamed").

This book has fascinated me since I first came across it almost 10 years ago, as a high school junior snooping in a friend's parents' bedroom. I can say honestly and without embarassment that it took me years to get a grip on it. Certain parts are easier to digest than others ("The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia" and "Willow in Spring Wind: A Showing" are dazzlingly accessible), but it's the larger movement of the book-length sequence that I have come to appreciate as Graham's real specialty. That being said, The Errancy is at once her most cohesive and complex book. Swarm far surpasses it for difficulty but not for pleasure. Never idles; Overlord stands shocked.

Though I don't think the copious Ashbery comparisons are entirely justified, I do know that he and Graham are in asimilar vein of difficulty. But I also don't find it necessary to investigate the sweeping philosophical and mythological history and extensive "silent quotation" infused in her words to recognize her powers. She is a difficult writer, true, but one of razor-sharp and majestic vision.

Yes: Stevens and Ashbery
Yes, Graham's The Errancy is in the spirit of Stevens and Ashbery--perhaps even inheriting their spirits--and what's wrong with that?This is my favorite book from a poet who has transformed American poetry--like Ashbery and Stevens before him--and has become in my mind the single greatest poet in the English language.The book is a chore and a treat--I recommend it very highly!

Seems too much like late Stevens
Graham seems too involved with the imagery and particularly the style of the late poetry of Wallace Stevens.E.g., "An Ordinary Evening at New Haven."

Ashbery Heights
Empowered by Vendler and company, she becomes Ashbery. ... Read more

Amazon.com Review
Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and itsdisappearance."

With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

If you open and close your eyes
there should be a difference, no, in the way
the thing seen is--in its weight?--and then
what the thinking has begun to make ... because there is, on it, which we've
somehow
introduced, this wash which is duration....
("Philosopher's Stone")

Customer Reviews (18)

Uh-oh.
This is unreadable.Go find someting else.Quickly.Notice how the people who review this book are directly polarized - they love it or hate it.If you love Graham's stuff, go for it, you won't be disappointed.But if you're not a Graham fan stay away.If you're looking to read her for the first time, try Swarm, it's cleaner and more accessible.

The Emperor's New Clothes
Her work is unreadable.It's too bad she abandoned what she had accomplished with Erosion so many years ago.She is good at convincing people of her importance and so no one will tell the truth about her work.If someone does, that person risks being thought of as a bad reader.But there is nothing to nourish the soul in her poems. Nothing to contemplate.They are not even interesting technically. The passionate defenses she generates always make me think of "protesting too much."Her work is like reading impenetrable critical essays.And even critical essays can be written for pleasurable reading, with ease and style.American poetry has gone down a wrong road by following her example.

again, vision only Jorie Graham could pull off
In my judgment, Never could be one of Jorie Graham's most important books.It's amazing how she can write this way -- immediately accessible & still syntactically, linguistically, poetically, wholly innovative.Everything she writes by now is controversial, but never doubt her mastery.She revises her poems so many times people would be appalled, making sure that every bit of the music of her poems is exactly as she wants & that she has said & laid out everything she wants to say exactly.These poems are bursts of physical substance, love, passion, & barrages of insight.They move just like universes exploding out of universes.They don't whizz by in a blur, but catch all over.This is a collection of instances that adhere to true devotion, starting with a prayer.

I hope this review has been helpful to you.

amazing
I can sing this poetry--Jorie Graham is the best at what she does.

The Time It Takes To Say
I have been trying to write something resembling a review of this book for a long time - during which time I have been living with and trying to absorb everything in NEVER, which is so much, and I still find it promising more even, than what I have from it already. The most immediate moment that presents itself in "Prayer" is the "here" of the now that is ghostly, yet audible somehow, still speakable, "posed," even on the lips.This "here" is just behind us as we read, and while it is lost in its instantiation as a moment of the most distinct pre-eminence, it is released in its passing into the visual current of the poem, and thus rendered palpable in different form.The persistence of this "spot of time" in light of what I would call its never-more-ness (and nevertheless still-being-ness) is what is at stake in the book, among many other things, among them, the difference between eternality (in part or whole, and as whom?) and immortality (in the sense of a Keatsian steadfastness of the bright star) and the idea of time as gravity, allowing for the possibility of being bound, itself the condition of freedom. The self does not save, and is not "saved" in its sameness, but in its being constantly sifted through time. And yet the "never" is next to the "here" and felt as such, as existing in intimate relation to it, neither by design nor choice, and not without the pathos of mute distance between them.In other words, I could not disagree more with the view expressed by Sven Birkerts (in his comment on NEVER in the New York Times) that "the disappearance of the perceived thing or the felt experience into the inconclusive enactments of process points to a dead end in Graham's art."It is precisely the tension between the perceiver and the thing perceived, the "here" of experience and the undertow in which it is swallowed up and released in new form that Graham addresses, with seriousness and the grave beauty of patient attention. I should also add that being in her class was a great joy for me. She is a generous and brilliant teacher and the care with which she reads poems is a moral statement, as well as a pleasure to behold. ... Read more

Product Description

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How -- in the face of the carnage of war, the no longer merely threatened destruction of the natural world, the faceless threat of spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear -- does one retain one's capacity to be both present and responsive? And to what extent does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an other and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? With what forces does the sheer act of apprehending make us complicit? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over?

Customer Reviews (5)

War in the Heart
There is something frantic in Jorie Graham's most recent book, the ominously titled "Overlord". Her poetry has always had a deep sense of urgency and sprawl, but coupled with a political fervor none too quiet in the face of current events and you have a roar of words as heavy as the burden of the past.

The posture of the book is bleak and desperate at times because she has taken up into her body humanity and history and we are -if we are anything- creatures of great yearning in the face of emptiness. "The aim is to become/ something broken/ that cannot break further." (Praying (Attempt of Feb 6 `04)). Six of the poems in the book are titled "Praying" (distinguished by dates on which they were "attempted"), but nearly all the poems are prayers, some sort of beseeching beyond the self to god and, at times, to the reader. It is a workbook of remorse and each poem is an exercise in seeing our shame, in calling us to remembrance. "Are we `beyond salvation'? Will you not speak?/ Such a large absence--shall it not compel the largest presence?/ Can we not break the wall?/ And can it please not be a mirror lord?" (Little Exercise).

This intertwining of prayers and politics is no ironic juxtaposition but a carefully reasoned connection between beliefs and wars. The book's opening quotes are enough to carry the argument, "Belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light." by Franz Kafka and the most chilling of all, from Leo Tolstoy, "Before a war breaks out, it has long begun in the hearts of the people." It is an amazing book and a far more beautiful and sensible response than the pablum that is "Poets Against the War".

Heavy handed
A bit overbearing (when not mawkish) is the sign of this poetry. It is not up to the best of what Graham can do. Her writing is always weighty, and in that mode can work wonders but not-- for the most part-- here. I'm afraid reputation has taken her professional reviewers into praises unwarranted and undeserved. The metaphysics doesn't reach; the reality doesn't call; the experiences don't tell-- the poetry doesn't work. We need the best of poetry for our lives, and with the devestation of the poetic landscape by the langpo people and the New York School and the midwestern inability to go beyond paltry, it is unfortunate that Graham has not come through for us in this book.

Good, but inconsistent.
Jorie Graham, Overlord (Ecco, 2005)

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. These poems live 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. ** ½

1945 meets 2003...
I read The End of Beauty when it came out years ago and dismissed Jorie Graham as an over-educated obscurantist. Then, a couple of months ago I came across one of the poems from this book in The New Yorker, and completely changed my mind.

I LOVE this book, have read it over and over again. The way she has layered 1945 on 2003 is heartbreaking on so many levels. The absolutely personal and the historical are intertwined so so beautifully in this work.

here's a small dose, so you can listen to her instead of me:

The dying mother in the waiting room with me
is talking with her daughter. She won't be here ever again soon. They have a brochure
spread out between them, a training program, involves some travel, can't see really
what it is. This, says the young girl, pointing, this, mom,
this part here is the part I'm excited about.

or this:

from Omaha

These are the givens:
poverty, greed, un-
expectedness. The bubble of the now being emitting from the
blossoming
then. That's all. Maybe disappearance--as of the moon
to the horror of the men already in dark.
And always the one, far away, sitting charred and absent-
minded, on his throne. And always an audience
for all this slaughter and laughter--
"later on." The last few decades at any given moment
a leaf that drops. Some twig left
bare. The change upon us. But the fall--the falling
of it
even after it's done--the fall: continues.
Because there is no way to get the killing to end.

I hear a lot of Rilke in Jorie Graham, a sense of suppressed exhortation, real wisdom coming from a very broken place... using that voice to speak about warfare and power and history and politics is very compelling.

Her best book ever
Often attacked for her headstrong ways andbecause, to be frank about it, she is a woman, Jorie Graham is triumphing over her current, well-publicized difficulties with a collection that adds new shadows and depths to what is already a distinctive voice and allusive, almost invsible storytelling.She has hit on the idea, the trope, of OVERLORD and managed to succeed at an unlikely target, a combination of historical detail like Stephen Ambrose, with her trademark exploration of consciousness, and a new attention to her long, long line which often reads as though thought itself was being examined and twisted along a wire, like a centipede on a tightrope, high above a crowd all of whose mouths hang gaping open.Let's look at an example, shall we?

In "EUROPE (Omaha Beach 2003)," Graham evokes the famous Norman landings by picking out the appropriate, sometimes surreal, nouns: "Boats, sirf, cries, miles, pool, bars, war."It is vivid, like the first reels of Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN."No/ container, friend," she adds."No basic building blocks "of/ matter.No constituent particles from which everything/ is made."Then, quick as a wince, she corrects herself: "No made."(Note the hidden word "nomad" in the middle of this, crouching like a Bedouin.)

Perhaps recent events in world history have keft US poets feeling nomadic, as though there were no real place for us any more on American soil,

Where would she be without Peter Sacks?He took a lovely photograph of her in Normandy in the very fields through which rthe Allies poured on June 6, 1944, and then again he made some kind of spectral collage for the books cover, random (perhaps?) newsprint torn and remounted, then superimposed with bold, Asian strokes of maroon, white and black paint.The field is yellow, stained with age and water damage, like the shipborne invasion itself.

With the double consciousness of a wound, Graham has made an interesting investment in reclaiming a crucial battle of World War II from the Tom Brokaws and the Gerald Fords who have claimed it as their own, and returned it to poetry where it belongs. ... Read more

Product Description
Jorie Graham is one of the most important American poets now writing. This first book-length study brings together thirteen previously published essays and review essays by many of the major critics currently interested in her work and five new essays commissioned for this volume. Commenting on each of Graham's eight poetry collections, these essays encompass the range of critical thought that her work has attracted, both surveying it broadly and engaging closely with individual poems.
These essays identify three broad concerns that run through each of her strikingly different volumes of poems: the movement of the mind in action, the role of the body in experiencing the world, and the pressures of material conditions on mind and body alike. Gardner both shows how Graham is being read at the moment and charts new areas of investigation likely to dominate thinking about her over the next decade. This collection is sure to become the crucial first step for all future work on Graham and on American poetry of the last two decades. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

operatic...cinematic
The book starts at the movies, & throughout there are voice-overs & further cinematic detail.But that's hardly what this book is about.Sort of a step down in difficultness from her previous book, The End of Beauty -- but still difficult & also beautiful conceptually, emotionally, musically, in a modern way....This book also has some of the most important poems of her career, & a lot of very interesting experiments that didn't get into her selected poems.For me, honestly, not a favorite Jorie Graham book, but a good one.At the time of this review, the only other review rated this 4 stars.I just gave it 5 so the average review could be 4 1/2.

Jorie's Operatic Form
The "difficulty" of Jorie Graham: of course she's difficult--why such a prize given to "easy"? Region of Unlikeness reads like an opera --like an opera, the language is dense, powerful, beautiful (though not, in this case, in another language--though some of Graham's criticsmight say otherwise!--), like the arias of an opera the poems are"staged," they are costumed and choreographed and possessdramatic urges not easily contained in a lyric form. Like James Merrill,like the best of Louise Gluck and the strangest of Jean Valentine, JorieGraham seems to be negotiating unfriendly turf between lyric, narrative,and "language" poetries--with satisfying, puzzling, entrancingresults. Even if someone has convinced you that there is nothing muchinteresting about Jorie Graham (that "difficult" woman!) givethis book a try--it is perhaps the most traditionally (if one dares usethat word to apply to Graham!) lyric and narrative of her later,'experimental' work. ... Read more

Product Description
To date, no book-length study of the work of poet Jorie Graham has been published. Graham now holds the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University; recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, Graham has established herself as one of the most important poets of her generation. This book addresses the connection between Graham's work and the legacy of American Modernism, arguing that her recurring interest in the visible world and how best to represent it in her poetry can be seen as a continuation of the work of Eliot and Stevens. For Graham, the visible world is a means of approaching the ineffable, or the divine. The poet's approach to the ineffable in her work is conflated at times with the relationship between the self and the other: maintaining the integrity of both and accurately representing the truth of what she sees become a moral project for the poet, aligning her work with that of the Moderns. The book addresses Graham's entire body of work, now nine books of poetry, and interprets her poetic preoccupation with visuality through the lens of psychoanalytic criticism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

got it for christmas
I got this book for christmas for my brother, who is an artist too, but unknown.These images and essays are so good I know he will be thrilled as I was to find them at last, because it took almost two years to get this one.I studied with the cedar program, and this book offers a rare chance to see the root of Idaho art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

breathtaking photographs
Barron's photographs and Graham's poetry compliment each other beautifully.The photographs are breathtaking; after flipping through a few pages you want to decorate your home in Barron's work.I have had this book for several years, and continue to treasure it.

breathtaking photographs!
I bought this book several years ago and I just love it.The photographs are just breathtaking.I highly reccommend this book to anyone who enjoys delicate poetry or appreciates art or photography.Barron, the photographer, has this subtle and amazingly artful eye and you leave the book wanting to decorate your home with her work.This is a must-have!

an inspiring coupling of image and text
Another beautifully printed book from Scalo. Pulitzer prize -winning Graham's sparse verse is not only inspired, but enhanced by MongomeryBarron's pristine imagery.Her (Barron's) still life photographs are notmerely decorative interperatations of form, texture and tone. Each image isa poem,a meditation, a complex expression of pure beauty and eerie silence. ... Read more

Product Description
Poems explore the dichotomy between spirit and body, perception and mechanism, process and product. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

her start, just her start
So this is her first book, from 1974.The way Jorie Graham feels now is that you'll have to pardon the youth of it.This book won't give you an idea of all the other amazing developments she's had in her career, for herself & for western poetry, but it is a showcase for her brilliant mind for metaphor & the sounds of poetry among other things.It'll show you how she started as a poet, so you can understand better her development as a poet.Besides that, it still gets 5 stars anyway for the brilliant, brilliant metaphor & thoughts throughout.

visceral mastery?
So when she first took up the craft of poetry, this is what she did.The poetics of the writing are not as difficult as her later work, but the thoughts are still huge concrete slabs of serious intelligence.It's still difficult, if not in precisely the same way as her later work, & it was clear from this book -- from the first few poems in this book -- that she had gigantic poetry inside her.

Fabulous debut.See where the great poet started!
This poetry is less compicated than Ms.Graham's newer poems.Though they still have that charm and profound ideas expressed in the most beautiful poetic language ever!Spring the few dollars for some poetic delight! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A slow year for poetry?
As with any anthology of poetry, the content largely depends on the editor. However, from the wonderful introduction Jorie Graham provided, I expected an equally wonderful collection in a call of arms for poets tohelp poets realize what they do is equally valid as anything else a writermay write, be it fiction or non-fiction. Unfortunately, I had troublefinding even one poem that was more that just okay. Perhaps it should justbe called American poetry of 1990. I would recommend the 1999 edition ofthis series over the 1990 edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

She Is the Yummiest Poet
Book aside, I just want to sleep with Jorie Graham.

monumental book for Jorie Graham
The poems in this book average about 10 pages long & focus incisively on philosophical questions with Jorie Graham's unique poetic perspective.

Amazing work from a brilliant artist
"A good poem is always a reaction, a moment of acute surprise that occurred in the soul of the speaker."Jorie Graham explores the natural and manmade world through a series of exceptionally well-crafted poems.Her voice is unique yet familiar, both strongly intellectual and intuitively inchoate.

Of her work James Tate has said: "Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be." ... Read more

Product Description

Chosen and with an Introduction by Jorie Graham, Evidences is the winner of the sixth annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. In poems that are by turns lyrical, disjunctive, autobiographical, and political, Evidences sifts through residues of landscape and history. The physicality of the language and the invocation of the world of places and things form a meditative process, surveying the conditions of perception and memory, history and grace.

from "The Sand Runs Through"

Coming out of the forest, at the edge of the clearing,
Then at your door bearing a suitcase of vials,
You opened your window to owls
Flying from pines, the sea a maze of color,
Remembering, then, walking in the desert
You whispered the stars too
Must be homeless, the desert the place of
His absence, that was the gift
Or that which was taken away,
You whispered, in the sand the marks of bodies
Stretched out among twisted wood,
As examples, lost, as warnings, figures of evidence.

"One wants to live in a world so very brimful of what one loves and yet so equally full of its destruction: I do not believe it is possible to miss how brave this book is, how daring, and given over to beauty—both in its surface and in its love of what is on our surfaces."—Jorie Graham

An independent scholar and writer, James McCorkle lives in Geneva, New York, with his wife and two young daughters. He received the M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and has had fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the NEA. He is the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry and the author off The Still Performance, a study of postmodern poetry.

Product Description

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How -- in the face of the carnage of war, the no longer merely threatened destruction of the natural world, the faceless threat of spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear -- does one retain one's capacity to be both present and responsive? And to what extent does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an other and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? With what forces does the sheer act of apprehending make us complicit? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over?

Product Description
In celebration of its 20th anniversary, "Conjunctions", "arguably the most distinguished journal of prose and poetry in America" (Elle), gathers a virtual Who's Who of innovative contemporary literature. "Conjunctions:37" will feature new work by writers as diverse as Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Chinua Achebe, Rick Moody, Richard Powers, Jorie Graham, William T. Vollmann, Paul West, Carole Maso, Ann Lauterbach, and many surprise contributors. This special issue will also feature an important short story by Vladimir Nabokov, newly translated by Dimitri Nabokov for "Conjunctions", which has never before appeared in English. Joyce Carol Oates offers a first look at her haunting new novel in progress, "The Falls", and William H. Gass gives us a darkly hilarious tour de force with his novella, "Charity". The 20th-anniversary issue will surely be, as the "Village Voice" has said of "Conjunctions", "A must read" for anyone interested in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama.

"Conjunctions" is striking...a rich collection which balances well-known writers with exciting new ones. --The New York Times Book Review "Conjunctions" offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work. --The Washington Post"

Edited by Bradford Morrow.Texts by Paul Auster, Chinua Achebe, Don DeLillo, Nomi Eve, William H. Gass, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Harry Matthews, Carole Maso, Rick Moody, Bradford Morrow, Vladimir Nabakov, Joyce Carol Oates,William T. Vollmann and Paul West.

6 x 9 in. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful collection in its own right
Conjunctions has for a long time been a source of truly new and groundbreaking writing in American Literature.The current issue not only continues this trend, but even exceeds the high water mark set by earliereditions of the journal, taking the time, as it does, to focus only onprose (saving the poetry, I understand, for the next issue).Collected inone place we have stories by some of our finest writers, set alongsideworks by newer, promising authors.From Coover's phantasmagoric andplayful "Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock" to Paul West'shaunting tale, this collection is thought-provoking and expansive. ... Read more