Jorie Graham Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 only then did I experience the sense of Jorie's words. I thought of how I had experienced James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and though not comprehending the words or even able to parse them, I began to absorb images and impressions, which became unravelled into a sort of experiencing the reality within the Music of the words. Jorie's language is, indeed, another Music which one ingests much as one experiences an intoxicant dream. Her detractors say that she is an elitist with language, and full of vain puffery. But they do not understand what they're seeing. Jorie's words are a wonderous and beautiful and magical melody!

this package is an expensive, over-the-top look at the abstract painting of the world's greatest living artist. every aspect of the production: box, metal slipcase, cd, book, folded enlargements, is beautifully executed. years from now, this will be the one critical gerhard richter item which every collector will be looking for. outstanding.

Unfortunately I haven't yet made it to SFMOMA to see the Gerhard Richter exhibit. However, my much anticipated copy of Richter 858 arrived in the mail today, and to say that it didn't disappoint is an understatement. I had initially been a little wary about getting it. It comes with an aluminum slipcase and poetry and an audio CD with music composed by the brilliant Bill Frisell, and while some might find this sort of presentation lush, I, being somewhat of a purist, was afraid these inclusions would be nothing more than bells and whistles-basically a lot of noise to give voice to a suite of paintings that, according to any good Kantian, should be able to stand on its own. Boy was I wrong. People who know me know that I don't like fuss, but even the worry about scratching the aluminum slipcase, or maneuvering the book's awkward size and bulk, or the guilt for not using gloves to turn these impeccably produced pages, couldn't dampen the sheer transport I felt as I drunk in art and text and Bill's passionate and daring compositions with equal abandon. I've been reluctant to embrace anything multimedia, but Richter 858 may have just pushed me into the 21st century.

This is a gorgeous book by a man who in the future will be credited with debunking all the art critics who since the 1950s have been shouting to themselves that Realism is dead, or the ones that still shout "painting is dead." Gerhard Richter breaks all the rules of "being an artist." He has worked in a variety of styles, refusing to produce a "style" as often artists are supposed to do. In his ealy photorealistic -paintings Richter copied ordinary, found images onto canvas, but gave them an indistinct appearance. Again, by working directly from photographs, he manages to debunk all the criticism that such techniques often bring. This subversive realism is now more evident than ever, in these later, almost fuzzy works that still manage to knock the visual senses as if shouting: "Long Live Painting - Long Live Realism!"

I've only recently become acquainted with the range of Gerhard Richter's work, but the series of eight abstract paintings which are being celebrated here are enough to justify his reputation for me, and the sheer richness and resolution of their presentation in this book is of a standard I've never come across anywhere. Elegant, sensuous and gorgeous, this is more than a `typical' art book in manners large and small; includes insightful essays by writers like Dave Hickey, poetry, and a CD by Bill Frisell with a string trio that's a lot more quirky and edgy than his recent stuff, in a good way (no banjos). The book's editor, David Breskin, has done an amazing job - the aluminum slipcase is a pretty sharp touch, too.

You don't have to be an afficionado of contemporary poetry, or an art lover, to appreciate the many delights housed within the aluminum slip case of this work. But if you happen to be either, or both, this book is a must.

The "book" has, in this case, evolved well beyond the concept of an art tome. The joining of music, poetry and lovingly accurate reproductions under one cover makes the circumnavigation of this opus is a particularly rich eexperience. Which is not to say that listening to the music , or dipping into one poem, is not an entirely satisfying moment by itself.

Be prepared, however: this gesamtwerk is big, and will not fit into an ordinary bookcase! The paintings being reproduced to scale has dictated the extra large format, but the extraordinarily accurate pictorial results are worth the extra weight.

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.

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.

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!

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

"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."

Book aside, I just want to sleep with Jorie Graham.

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!

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.

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

Just a note to recommend this and other Vendler lecture series books: "Poets Thinking", "Coming of Age as a Poet", and "Invisible Listeners" to anyone who wants to understand what poetry, now virtually dead in general regard, can be, where the value lies. Each one of these books explores a theme in the works of three or four poets, generally of different eras. Of the four books, I liked "Poets Thinking" the best. And I thought "Invisible Listeners" the most interesting topic: one that could be much more exhaustively pursued.
This particular series is about major changes in style. The cases are not parallel and none of these poets does much to illuminate the style or insights of any of the others. But each one is a person who wishes to confront life freshly and add that experience to the general experience through poetry, which is quite uncommon.

In The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Helen Vendler theoretically outlines the ways in which contemporary writing styles remain true to traditional literary form, while at the same time morph to fit "a new sense of life" pressing "unbidden upon the poet" (1). Focusing on the "material body" of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Jorie Graham, Vendler pushes these works against predecessors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Lowell, and Donne to demonstrate, through formal and stylistic critique, the way in which "breaking" standard literary tradition reflects epistemological changes in the writers themselves, which are brought into existence by societal forces external to the poets and manifested by gradation in the poetry produced: "The micro-levels of stylistic change...need to be attended to quite as much as the macro-levels...such micro-levels of change from poem to poem reflect changes of feeling, changes of aesthetic perception, or changes of moral stance in the poet" (4). What emerge in the poetic lines of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham are amalgamations of styles old and new; "espousals as well as rejections in the invention of the new stylistic body" (3). When analyzing the works of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, Vendler distinguishes each author's literary modification by the way in which (s)he manipulates metrical stresses, epistemological settings, and linear units, then illustrates the "perceptual, aesthetic and moral implications" that are demonstrated by their respective violations of standard, Modernistic literary conventions. Divided into three basic critical sections, The Breaking of Style discusses the principles surrounding the literary innovations of Hopkins's use of sprung rhythm, Heaney's manipulation of readerly phenomenological perception, and the societal implications surrounding the bricolage of human experience that is captured in the "cinematic freeze-frame" of Graham's later work (80). Using terminology reminiscent of postmodern critical theory, Vendler demonstrates that the stanzaic mimesis produced by the sensually assaultive affects of Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of the spondaic crush is designed to elicit an epistemologically reflective "psychic shock" in his readers: "When the mind becomes one gigantic cacophony of groans, in eight-beat sprung rhythm lines prolonging themselves into one undifferentiated monosyllabic vocal disharmony, we have come to the last agony of the stylistic body of poetry" (40). Hopkins's poetic innovation, Vendler states, reflects this phenomenon with "mimetic accuracy." When discussing Renaissance mnemonic theory in relation to established literary form, Vendler attributes Seamus Heaney's narrative arrogation to omniscience as being distinctly influenced by the literary styles of the Wordsworthian speaker, changed to reflect subjectivity through and in the sensual phenomenological setting. No more is the speaker the deliverer of allegorical reflection, but rather the speaker becomes a vehicle of "clairvoyant perception" through Heaney's employment of adjectival and adverbial innovation (42). This "reanimation" of the past in Heaney's poetry serves to create a new found ontological zone or "third realm, neither one of pure memory actively revised nor one of present distanced actuality, but rather one of the past remembered as prophesy" (48). Likewise, Vendler demonstrates Jorie Graham's liberties taken with poetic line length as a means to lay bare the traditions of Modernism by foregrounding, for example, the setting of a work, or that which was traditionally viewed as literary back-drop. This creation of a separate ontological zone through asymptotic gesture on the part of Graham serves to redefine the aim of verse as an "earthly, terrain-oriented lateral search" (78). The Keatisian "fine excess" present in the poetry of Graham now serves as a way, Vendler demonstrates, to illustrate Graham's "Dream of the Unified Field"; to represent "the luxurious spread of experienced being, preanalytic and precontingent" (84). Written in a narrative prose style rich in alliterative crafting and stylistic construction, Helen Vendler's The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham offers an alternative and well-supported insight into the makings of the postmodern ideological perspective. By demonstrating the similarities and differences of the works of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham in relation to their contemporaries and predecessors, Vendler delineates without the hindrance of elevated postmodern literary jargon the ways in which these authors transform canonized literary form into a more pliable arena designed to reflect their ever-changing sociological realities. Through the literary innovations of writers such as Hopkins, Heaney and Graham, as well as semi-tacit adherence to the inspirations behind such formalistic construction, Vendler states convincingly, "the style of our own inner kinesthetic motions has...been broken and remade" (95).

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.

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.

"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 a similar 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.

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."

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!

Empowered by Vendler and company, she becomes Ashbery.

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.

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.

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.

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 with clever, audible rhythms and rhymes. Most of the poems focus on a particular artist or saint or philospher--which is refreshing for those of us who bore easily of traditional nature poetry. Taken together, the poems, like many of those in recent book SWARM, deal with the seen & the unseen, the real & the imagined, the actual & the conceptual. EROSION is a bold step outward in American poetry.

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.

Five LYRICAL Stars! AWESOME!! Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship-winner Jorie Graham has created wonderfully reflective poems dealing with current matters: from nature out-of-balance, to the flawed activities at Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay Cuba, to reflections on the joys and challenges of childhood, nature, and love, she covers a lot of ground and subject matter. Each is a uniquely structured poem and she has a keen ability to use a few words and phrases to paint a larger picture in the mind, often times using timeless descriptions of nature and times of the day as springboards to launch her perspectives. My Favorites are "Sea Change": a reflection on the winds of change and the after effects. "Guantánamo" with its insecurities and hope for forgiveness; "This" with its beautiful night-time description which is a set up for the ending. "Undated Lullaby" where a glance into a tree sets off a torrent of thoughts. And perhaps, 'the best of the best', the totally absorbing "Root End". My Highest Recommendation. The words "Spiral staircase made of words" reverberate across the landscape of this amazing poetry: indeed!!! Five INSIGHTFUL Stars!!! (This review is based on an ebook download.)

Whereas the pleasures of The Errancy and Never are both myriad and readily apparent, this book's charms are 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.