Dream of the Unified Field

Selected Poems

Graham Jorie

Jorie Graham's poetry insists that "the visible world" exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the merely subjective, the merely lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area "saturated with phenomena", in Helen Vendler's phrase, a place of shifting perspectives, abrupt changes, sometimes vertiginous in their reversals, but always moving towards possible celebration.

Those who argue that poetry and science are at each other's throats will find here a poetry which brings together in tense equilibrium science, philosophy and history. This is a new kind of narrative, offering forms which are open and full of possibility. Graham's is an inclusive art which takes big risks. John Ashbery describes her "utterance that swings with the conviction of Blake's, that one does not want to stop listening to. She is one of the finest poets writing today".

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)

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