Overlord
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".
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
Publishers Weekly 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)
