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...
Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing to...
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...
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...
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.The New Republic writes, "for 'swarm, ' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty -- that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern...
T S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heraldi...
"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute." from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series. "Dionisio D. Martinez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive." Susan Hussey,...
"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of...
"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must...
"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occa...
. . . . How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No-one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line bodies and wings to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It's a long...
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.
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...
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.
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 Ti...
Jorie Graham's poetry insists that the visible world exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the subjective, the lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area saturated with phenomena, in Helen Vendler's phrase, a place of shifting perspectives, abrupt changes, sometimes vertiginous in their reversals, but always moving towards possible celebration.
Jorie Graham's poetry insists that the visible world exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the subjective, the lyric, she ventures with philosophi...
Swarm, Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros and law. The poet confronts a fundamental problem: whom to address, who there still is to address. She negotiates passionately with those powers that human beings feel themselves subject to: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love.
Swarm, Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros and law. The poet confronts a funda...
