Errancy

Poems

Graham Jorie

"The Errancy" is a pensive and erotic new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Dream of the Unified Field". In these poems Jorie Graham approaches a number of numinous characters, each an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political or spiritual desire – desire seeking its place in an age of betrayed values, where dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts.

Error is explored as the heroic form of finding one's way – a purposeful wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage in which the heart's longing is guide. Lovers celebrate the body; angels deliver celestial warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal; a few soldiers sleep before a sepulchre while something inexplicable happens behind their backs.

Sacred and spiritual, celestial and corporeal, coexist: "The Errancy" confirms John Ashbery's description of Graham as "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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