Acclaimed as one of America's most passionate and intelligent innovators, Jorie Graham writes poems of luminous formal beauty. Here she selects from the five books that preceded her 2012 Forward Prize-winning collection P L A C E, presenting European readers with a coherent and compelling body of work. The book complements her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Dream of the Unified Field" (1996), which selected work from her first five books. Jorie Graham's poems address a planet spinning towards an unknowable future. They challenge us to inhabit a more responsive and responsible place in language and the world. Her poetry is as urgent as it is essential.
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
Awards won by Jorie Graham
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)
"Graham stands among a small group of poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore) whose styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they exist as self-made things... providing all the satisfactions we expect from poetry – aural beauty, emotional weight – along with an intellectual rigor we don't expect. No one but Jorie Graham could have written them" – The Nation
"If [Graham] has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry in English, it is because she continually recalls the great Western tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry... tenaciously thinking and feeling her way through layer after layer of perception, and out to its extremities, like no poet before her" – Calvin Bedient
"No other current American poet... has employed and exposed the actual mechanics of narrative, of form, of strategic inquiry more fully than Graham has, and no other poet [is] able to deploy so fruitfully and invitingly the diverse systems of philosophy, science, and history. If anyone can unify the disjointed fields of contemporary discourse, I think it might be" – Jorie Graham, The Kenyon Review
"One of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language... She is like no one else, neither in her rhythms nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space" – Times Literary Supplement
"[...] Challenging the eye to follow its jagged paragraphs, this is verse that tries to attend to every second of perception [...] These poems are arresting in their determination to see beyond the comforts of civilisation [...] Graham does not offer poetry as a way of transcending environmental crisi. Instead she uses her searching, associative sentences to think along the fragile chain of being" – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
