Jorie Graham

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How - in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear - does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far 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? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over? Jorie Graham, in this her most personal and urgent collection to date, undertakes to explore these questions, often from vantage points geographically and historically 'other'. Many of the poems occur along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and the Normandy landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. This work meditates on our new world, ghosted and threatened by competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, 'free'.

"Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have."--New York Times Book ReviewA vibrantly focused and intense collection of verse from Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field.... I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never. Deftly meditating on nature, spirit, and imagination, Never showcases one of America's most gifted and respected poets at the height of her creativity. These graceful, probing poems, distinguished by long, meticulously sculpted, almost muscular lines, are among the finest and most innovative compositions in the genre today.

A New York Times Notable Book "These poems are among the most intense, personal, and ardent Graham] has written." --Boston Book ReviewThe eighth collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery--and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding her as a profound voice in American poetry. In Swarm, 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 for Graham--is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is... and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding."

A New York Times Notable BookPulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots--and builds a rich musical meditation on desire. In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire--desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one's way--a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body's strictest longing, here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs. Provocative in its spirited merging of the sacred and the skeptical, the celestial and the earthly, The Errancy confirms Graham as "one of our best, most important" poets (Library Journal) and "one of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language" (Times Literary Supplement).

A major collection of poetry brings together works from the poet's first five works: Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism. Reprint.

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. This collection of poetry brings together in equilibrium science, philosophy and history. The "Selected Poems" draws on several earlier collections, "Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts" (1980), "Erosion" (1983), "The End of Beauty" (1987), "Region of Unlikeness" (1991) and "Materialism" (1993).

Poems explore a variety of subjects including love, nature, mythology, belief, and spirituality

From Erosion: SAN SEPOLCRO Jorie Graham ... 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 way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops. Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California. She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.

"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 bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "Mother's Sewing Box," "For My Father Looking for My Uncle," and "The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria." Finally, the poet's words again: "...you get / just what you want" and (just before that), "Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."--Marvin Bell