Swarm
"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, whom 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. She remains "A poet of large ambitions and reckless music", as J. D. McClatchy wrote in the "New York Times"; she "writes with a meta-physical flair and emotional power".
"To swarm" is to leave a hive, a home, a stable sense of one's body, a hierarchy of values, in an attempt, apart, to found new forms that will hold. Key players in Graham's drama are the first person, the enjambement, the phrase, the gap, the sentence. And everywhere, lovers seek the borders they must break as well as those they must at all costs hold. Clytemnestra awaits Agamemnon, Calypso veils Ulysses, Daphne accepts Apollo: figures familiar from her earlier books reappear, eager to plead their stories into sense.
About the Author
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently "FAST" (2017) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her collection "PLACE" (2012) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other Carcanet collections include "Sea Change" (Ecco, 2008), "Never" (2002), "Swarm" (2000), and "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994", which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption – intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic – rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems". Graham has also edited two anthologies, "Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language" (1996) and "The Best American Poetry 1990". Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Reviews
Short-listed, 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize (P L A C E)
Short-listed, 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection (P L A C E)
"We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight. If we can't see, with Graham, 'the spots where the birds must eventually land', at least we know now where we should be looking" – Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement
