Jorie Graham Books
Books-Under-Review-->Arts-->Literature-->Authors-->G-->Graham, Jorie-->2
Related Subjects:
More Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Related Subjects:
More Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Jorie Graham Books sorted by
Average customer review: high to low
.
Sea Change: Poems
Published in Hardcover by Ecco (2008-04-01)
List price: $23.95
New price: $13.17
Used price: $11.00
Used price: $11.00
Average review score: 
A Lovely Work by an American Master
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 1 total.
Review Date: 2008-04-14
Review Date: 2008-04-14
SEA CHANGE: DEEP POETIC REFLECTIONS
Helpful Votes: 2 out of 3 total.
Review Date: 2008-04-01
Review Date: 2008-04-01
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's branches 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.)
A shattered music
Helpful Votes: 4 out of 6 total.
Review Date: 2008-04-07
Review Date: 2008-04-07
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.
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.
Region of Unlikeness
Published in Paperback by Harpercollins (1999)
List price:
Average review score:
operatic...cinematic
Helpful Votes: 0 out of 0 total.
Review Date: 2003-04-07
Review Date: 2003-04-07
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
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 2 total.
Review Date: 2000-03-15
Review Date: 2000-03-15
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 critics might say otherwise!--), like the arias of an opera the poems are "staged," they are costumed and choreographed and possess dramatic urges not easily contained in a lyric form. Like James Merrill, like the best of Louise Gluck and the strangest of Jean Valentine, Jorie Graham seems to be negotiating unfriendly turf between lyric, narrative, and "language" poetries--with satisfying, puzzling, entrancing results. Even if someone has convinced you that there is nothing much interesting about Jorie Graham (that "difficult" woman!) give this book a try--it is perhaps the most traditionally (if one dares use that word to apply to Graham!) lyric and narrative of her later, 'experimental' work.
Dream Of The Unified Field
Published in Paperback by Ecco (1997-01-01)
List price: $15.00
New price: $4.99
Used price: $1.52
Collectible price: $25.00
Used price: $1.52
Collectible price: $25.00
Average review score:
The downhill slide of a once-great poet.
Helpful Votes: 0 out of 0 total.
Review Date: 2008-07-18
Review Date: 2008-07-18
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. **
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?
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 2 total.
Review Date: 2006-08-17
Review Date: 2006-08-17
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.
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
Helpful Votes: 5 out of 8 total.
Review Date: 2003-10-12
Review Date: 2003-10-12
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?
Helpful Votes: 5 out of 8 total.
Review Date: 2003-04-07
Review Date: 2003-04-07
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
Helpful Votes: 6 out of 16 total.
Review Date: 2002-02-19
Review Date: 2002-02-19
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.
Overlord : Poems
Published in Hardcover by (2005-03-01)
List price: $22.95
New price: $6.99
Used price: $7.04
Used price: $7.04
Average review score:
War in the Heart
Helpful Votes: 2 out of 2 total.
Review Date: 2006-12-04
Review Date: 2006-12-04
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".
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".
Good, but inconsistent.
Helpful Votes: 5 out of 6 total.
Review Date: 2005-11-08
Review Date: 2005-11-08
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
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
Heavy handed
Helpful Votes: 7 out of 11 total.
Review Date: 2005-11-22
Review Date: 2005-11-22
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.
1945 meets 2003...
Helpful Votes: 8 out of 9 total.
Review Date: 2005-08-02
Review Date: 2005-08-02
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.
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
Helpful Votes: 9 out of 16 total.
Review Date: 2005-07-24
Review Date: 2005-07-24
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.
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.
Conjunctions: 35, American Poetry: States of the Art
Published in Paperback by Bard College (2001-08-15)
List price: $15.00
New price: $1.85
Used price: $0.47
Collectible price: $15.00
Used price: $0.47
Collectible price: $15.00
Average review score:
table of contents
Helpful Votes: 5 out of 5 total.
Review Date: 2001-01-06
Review Date: 2001-01-06
An all-poetry anthology, featuring the very best established and up-and-coming contemporary American writers. CONJUNCTIONS:35 American Poetry: States of the Art
FALL, 2000 Edited by Bradford Morrow
Table of contents
John Ashbery, Four Poems
Lyn Hejinian, Two Poems
Myung Mi Kim, Siege Document
Brenda Coultas, Three Poems
Arthur Sze, Quipu
Jorie Graham, Six Poems
Michael Palmer, Three Poems
Mark McMorris, Reef: Shadow of Green
Susan Wheeler, Each's Cot An Altar Then
Ann Lauterbach, Three Poems
Clark Coolidge, Arc of His Slow Demeanors
Gustaf Sobin, Two Poems
Alice Notley, Four Poems
Tessa Rumsey, The Expansion of the Self
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, Two Landscapes
Forrest Gander, Voiced Stops
Tan Lin, Ambient Stylistics
Marjorie Welish, Delight Instruct
Laynie Browne, Roseate, Points of Gold
James Tate, Two Poems
Honor Moore, Four Poems
Leslie Scalapino, From The Tango
Bin Ramke, Gravity & Levity
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Two Poems
Charles Bernstein, Reading Red
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein, A Dialogue
Rosmarie Waldrop, Five Poems
Martine Bellen, Two Poems
Peter Sacks, Five Poems
Reginald Shepherd, Two Poems
Barbara Guest, Two Poems
Donald Revell, Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century
Paul Hoover, Resemblance
Elaine Equi, Five Poems
Norma Cole, Conjunctions
Jena Osman, Boxing Captions
Ron Silliman, Fubar Clus
John Yau, Three Movie Poems
Melanie Neilson, Two Poems
Robert Kelly, Orion: Opening the Seals
Nathaniel Mackey, Two Poems
C.D. Wright, From One Big Self
Peter Gizzi, Fin Amor
Carol Moldaw, Festina Lente
Charles Norton, Five Poems
Robert Creeley, Supper
Brenda Shaughnessy, Three Poems
Malinda Markham, Four Poems
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow
Nathaniel Tarn, Two Poems
Peter Cole, Proverbial Drawing
Fanny Howe, Splinter
Anne Tardos, Four Plus One K
Robert Tejada, Four Poems
Andrew Mossin, The Forest
Elizabeth Willis, Two Poems
David Shapiro, Two Poems
Camille Guthrie, At the Fountain
Susan Howe, From Preterient
Cole Swensen, Seven Hands
Susan Howe and Cole Swensen, A Dialogue
Keith Waldrop, A Vanity
Will Alexander, Fishing as Impenetrable Stray
Juliana Spahr, Blood Sonnets
Jerome Sala, Two Poems
Leonard Schwartz, Ecstatic Persistence
Catherine Imbriglio, Three Poems
Vincent Katz, Two Poems
Thalia Field, Land at Church City
John Taggart, Not Egypt
Renee Gladman, The Interrogation
Laura Moriarty, Seven Poems
Kevin Young, Film Noir
Jackson Mac Low, Five Stein Poems
Rae Armantrout, Four Poems
Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space
Never: Poems
Published in Hardcover by (2002-03-31)
List price: $22.95
New price: $8.97
Used price: $6.59
Used price: $6.59
Average review score: 
amazing
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 6 total.
Review Date: 2003-08-19
Review Date: 2003-08-19
I can sing this poetry--Jorie Graham is the best at what she does.
again, vision only Jorie Graham could pull off
Helpful Votes: 2 out of 4 total.
Review Date: 2004-04-26
Review Date: 2004-04-26
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.
Uh-oh.
Helpful Votes: 4 out of 7 total.
Review Date: 2004-06-06
Review Date: 2004-06-06
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 Time It Takes To Say
Helpful Votes: 4 out of 10 total.
Review Date: 2002-08-02
Review Date: 2002-08-02
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.
The Emperor's New Clothes
Helpful Votes: 6 out of 9 total.
Review Date: 2004-05-22
Review Date: 2004-05-22
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.
Swarm
Published in Paperback by Ecco (2001-06-01)
List price: $14.00
New price: $3.84
Used price: $1.95
Used price: $1.95
Average review score:
Worthy
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 6 total.
Review Date: 2001-07-19
Review Date: 2001-07-19
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
Helpful Votes: 1 out of 4 total.
Review Date: 2001-06-15
Review Date: 2001-06-15
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.
Pushing through.
Helpful Votes: 5 out of 8 total.
Review Date: 2002-03-09
Review Date: 2002-03-09
Jorie Graham, in our blandly supersensible age, has somehow reconjured Mallarme's "night made of absence and questioning." I haven't been this enchanted or mystified -- one and the same emotion, really -- by a book of poetry since Nightwood. How is it possible that an American wrote this, and a TEACHER? You'd expect there to be some lingering trace of workshopped inanity, of the tenured smugness Franny railed against, but there isn't. Not a whiff. She must be something of a Machiavel to have landed her job, because Swarm is a full-bore assault on the idea of poetry being teachable.
I think the trouble people have with this book is the same reason why it delights me -- that it's written by an American. If a Czech or a Polak had written this, the author would be hailed as a genius. But somehow we expect less from ourselves. "How many syllables Is your nation?" Graham asks at one point, and gets a monosyllabic grunt in reply. Americans are expected to be sensible, but not intelligent; perceptive, but not well-read; energetic, but not exhausting. Graham, the defiant one, is the second of all these categories. She makes no secret of having learned her craft from books -- though life is always her well of inspiration -- and that she expects the reader to rise to the challenge by maybe even reading some of them. The cheek! This presumptuous woman may even expect us to have some knowledge of foreign languages, helping us to develop a more flexible, childlike receptivity to new combinations and juxtapositions of words ( my German must sound to the members of that poor nation something like a Jorie Graham poem. ) To ask us to take on such a burden merely to get some pleasure out of 110 pages of poetry... This is not done. Give us more autobiographical mini-narratives about New Jersey marriages on the rocks.
The irony is that Swarm is the most epochal volume of poetry written in this country since Leaves of Grass. Graham, like Joyce, like every great artist, is an exile, even if she still remains within our borders. There's no way to analyze it in the depth it deserves here, but Graham's influences include, among seemingly everything else that's ever been written, the negative space of Mallarme, the cut-up technique of Burroughs, and the primitivism of Dickinson. It's a celebration of form, but not over content -- Graham knows, is seemingly alone in knowing these days, that perfect form creates its own content.
It will take work to decipher, but then anything of value does. The benighted reaction to this book is the final proof of her grim formulation: "This much is certain. / Dream has no friends."
there's a reason graham is a genius, she just is
Helpful Votes: 6 out of 8 total.
Review Date: 2005-06-03
Review Date: 2005-06-03
A superb poetic adaptation of Irwin Allen's 70's superthriller The Swarm. As swarms of deadly bees circle and descend upon the flower festival, Graham embarks upon a new poetic vision never seen before. Later disaster books, most notably Paul Andresen's Deadly Swarm, tried to replicate the brilliance of the original with CGI effects, but poetry audiences just weren't fooled, and the books were relegated to late night Sci-Fi Channel syndication. See also: Never, based upon Mosquito, by Gary Jones. Here, Graham magnificently adapts the tale of a group of mosquitos who feast upon the corpses of space aliens and subsequently terrorize a world of camping enthusiasts and sex-crazed teenagers. Three billion thumbs up.
"Smarm" instead of "Swarm"
Helpful Votes: 6 out of 14 total.
Review Date: 2003-05-02
Review Date: 2003-05-02
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.
The Best American Poetry 1990
Published in Hardcover by Scribner Book Company (1990-10)
List price: $24.95
Used price: $1.67
Average review score:
A slow year for poetry?
Helpful Votes: 3 out of 6 total.
Review Date: 2000-06-01
Review Date: 2000-06-01
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 to help poets realize what they do is equally valid as anything else a writer may write, be it fiction or non-fiction. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding even one poem that was more that just okay. Perhaps it should just be called American poetry of 1990. I would recommend the 1999 edition of this series over the 1990 edition.
All Things
Published in Hardcover by Empyrean Press (2002)
List price:
Antaeus - No. 34, Summer, 1979
Published in Paperback by Ecco Press (1979)
List price:
Used price: $12.50
Books-Under-Review-->Arts-->Literature-->Authors-->G-->Graham, Jorie-->2
Related Subjects:
More Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Related Subjects:
More Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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.