From the New World: Poems 1976-2012

by Jorie Graham

An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham.

The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation.” In 1996, her volume of poetry selected from her first five books, Dream of a Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.

In From the New World—Poems 1976-2014, we can witness the unfolding of Graham’s signature ethical and eco-political concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, love and, increasingly, love of the world in a time of crisis. As the work evolves, the depth of compassion grows—gradually transforming, widening and expanding her extraordinary formal resources and her inimitable style.

These pages present a brilliant portrait one of the major voices of American contemporary poetry. As critic Calvin Bedient says, “If Graham has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry, 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, like no poet before her.”

Genres: Poetry

374 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2014

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: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

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

[Jeff]

There's a lovely echo right at the opening of "I Watched a Snake," from Jorie Graham's second volume of poems, Erosion, that I didn't hear until I read it aloud this morning. The title "reads" into the poem's first sentence, so that, for this busy reader, at least, the temptation is to read the first sentence as a sentence, despite the lattice-work lines that hemi-stitch at essentially tetrameter and dimeter in six line stanzas. The sentence goes as follows: "I watched a snake hard at work in the dry grass behind the house catching flies." Here it is lineated: "I Watched a Snake || hard at work in the dry grass | behind the house | catching flies." I don't start the hearing the lines as lines until a medial caesura: The line continues: "It kept on | disappearing. | And though I know this has | something to do || with lust, today it seemed | to have to do | with work." By the end of this passage, I'm focused in my recitation on the way sentences stop periodically, sometimes mid-line, to follow a narrow of emotion -- this, just precisely because the line offers us a bit of imaginative control in language's associative power.

My very private association here was with Williams' dramatic monologue for his mother, "Widow's Lament in Springtime," where the widow walks unanswerably amid the flowers shared for "Thirty-five years | I lived with my husband." Those years have a different resonance, so a different line, when the love is mere magical thought. "[b]ut the grief in my heart | is stronger than they, | for though they were my joy | formerly, today I notice them | and turn away forgetting." The echo, for me, was Graham's "And though I know . . . with lust, today it seemed" rhyming with Williams' "for though they . . . formerly, today I notice them . . ." But where Williams' widow will not judge her own desire to follow her husband in death by going to "a meadow, at the edge of a heavy woods, in the distance," where her son has told her of trees of white flowers, "and sink into the marsh near them," Graham's snake puts her in mind of a body's presence in any physical field, "This . . . perfect progress where | movement appears | to be a vanishing, a mending | of the visible || by the invisible -- just as we stitch the earth, |it seems to me, each time | we die, going back under, coming back up . . ." Williams' widow feels guilt in the unacknowledged co-inhabitance in time of those perennials, and wants to make some sacrifice to her husband's memory on their behalf, while Graham's snake does groundwork on her speaker's likelihood of reading the natural object's adequacy in terms of the body's fallenness, with labor its recompense for that fallenness.

As the poem closes, Graham's speaker becomes more dramatic, and the Keatsian dome (of backyard) a bit more echoey: "an honest work of the body, | its engine, its wind." By the last stanza, the metonymy's groundwork has given over to a craft-work, "meanings like sailboats | setting out || over the mind. Passion is work | that retrieves us, | lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us, | it fastens us | to sturdier stuff | no doubt." The performative ("no doubt") aggressively bays back on the poem's clever troping at the beginning, where the snake played Demeter to the field's hemstitches. Something Eliotic that needs Marc Anthony creeps into the close. Nonetheless the poem offers an interesting revanche on Williamsian progressivism, and signals a resistance ("sturdier stuff") Eliotic modernism found in the early Eighties. Let the "perfect progress" stay awhile as enemy of the good.

[Carolyn Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a gorgeous book -- I mean just as an object -- for one thing and the selections well chosen from four decades of writing. I'm not *as* in love with the new poems . . . something a bit deliberate, overly particular you can see coalesce in the final lines of these. Still, it's Jorie Graham: they're damn good, particularly digging "Double Helix." Now, to the collection as a whole, some of these poems are as good as any contemporary poetry I've read, period. "Le Manteau de Pascal" and "The Dream of the Unified Field," for example.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice representative sample of Graham's work, though it seems like some of her more formally and philosophically inventive poems have been neglected in favor of those that make her appear to conform to the American romantic tradition.

[Abby]

A 360-page book of poetry is a very different reading endeavor than a 360-page novel. Which might be why books of poetry are usually much shorter. Which might also be why this took me a solid 2 years. I could not get enough Jorie Graham from the Poetry Foundation website to satisfy, so this collection was a cure. Interestingly, it does not include most of the poems the Poetry Foundation chose to offer—this collection seems bent slightly towards Graham’s nature-gazing or philosophical work and slightly away from her descriptions of relationships, although a suspicious “you” does crop up.

These poems require a quiet mind for me to digest. Graham is the master of scenes, “the visible world,” but her pastoralism always has a philosophical depth that takes brainwork. This is why I love it. This is why I will come back again and again to “Vertigo,” “where the mind opened out / into the sheer drop of its intelligence”; to “The Bird That Begins It” and its “huge breath-held, candle-lit, whistling, planet-wide, still blood-flowing, / howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of / the human”. The light in these poems is so precise and seasonal that you can practically pinpoint the day and the hour every one of them was written. This is what makes her so intuitive to pull out on the solstice or to read at sunrise. Graham’s great gift is still lifes, but the years keep turning and I'm happy to have these views come back around.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of my poetry binge reading. The poems tend to be longer, which allows for some interesting development of theme. Mostly, one more parameter space in getting caught up to speed in modern poetry!

[Lisa]

I encountered the author from the New Yorker poetry podcast and really liked her work there. I was taken by the first quarter or so of this collection, but then it fell apart for me.

[Jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I simply cannot believe all the 5 stars. This book was an absolute chore to read.

[austyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

i will preface this by saying that i am not the biggest fan of poetry . that being said , i was very disappointed in this . i had high hopes because i has recently been getting more into contemporary poetry , but this collection didn’t excite me . it just wasn’t my thing i guess , but i can see why an older audience may appreciate it more . i did have to read many of the poems for my language and literature class so that could be part of the problem .

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is some decent stuff here, particularly in the beginning where one will encounter the strongest poem of the collection, "Reading Plato." But what makes that poem work so well is precisely what is missing in the majority of the book. "Reading Plato" is well organized, not overly-long, and makes interesting metaphorical leaps within its structured lines. Unfortunately, Jori's poetics "evolved" into what is now a fairly typical academic and sprawling free verse style with arbitrary lineation that goes on interminably for pages. When line breaks are randomly employed like this and at such length, it makes it very difficult for a reader to determine what is being emphasized exactly and why: the line breaks themselves become a stumbling block and the whole visual focus of the poem with the end result being that the words hardly matter at all. Graham is a smart human being and I have enjoyed reading interviews featuring her thoughts on poetry. But so much of the work here is simply too tedious to reward the attention required to get through it. It isn't that her overall project or even subject matter isn't deserving of the attention....it's that too many of the poems simply don't succeed as poems! They often sound more like fragmented dream journal entries and as most people know: hearing someone else describe their own disjointed dream sequence is almost always not as interesting to the listener as it is to the dreamer.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A precious volume. I cannot pretend to offer a full or qualified review of this book. It will take me decades to work my way through it. It is that rich, that demanding. The poems feel utterly contemporary, haunted by foreboding and infused with despair at the cruel cosmological joke the human experiment has become. Yet this despair is countered by a mystical passion that seeks to commune with the living world, on its own terms. Immersing oneself in Graham’s incantations is to step into a liminal space, suspended between the pores and fibrous crenellations of Earth’s biota and the sublime emptiness of the cosmos.

I read The Visible World with my students at the close of our semester-long exploration of Landscape & Imagination. One of us divided the poem into sections and passed the lines around the group, a few for each to read. I was graciously entrusted with the finale:

Oh enslavement will you take these hands
and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can't see in daylight, young, light
and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

She definitely has talent, and is able to creatively combine the mundane/everyday with myth; the general effect of these poems is something like 60% Mary Oliver, 40% Ted Hughes? Maybe? (She even steals a couple lines from Hughes, on page 302.)

Despite flashes of brilliance, Graham's work is (in general) vaguely obtuse, pretentious, incoherent . . . gnomic and cryptic in a tedious, rather than compelling, way. Similar to Michael Dickman (or, again, Hughes) she has a dispiriting tendency to throw together images and phrases in the vague hope that a narrative will emerge, rather than working to create one. She also has that common failing of late-twentieth century poetry, where the enjambment is 'creative' (i.e., ridiculous and distracting) and the poetry itself is often just prose with line breaks.

Yet with all that said, I never wanted to stop reading, and I did indeed finish the book; she's never 'bad' exactly, the poems are never boring, I don't think I actively disliked a single poem (except for maybe the soapboxing political stuff in her later collections) . . . I just kept hoping she would figure out how to marshal her talents more effectively and create better poems.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Now look at you.
Are you an entire system of logic and truth?
Are you a pathway with no body ever really on it?
Are you shatterable if you took your fist now to
this face that looks at you as you hold to your stare?
Here. You are at the beginning of something. At the exact
beginning. Ok. This is awakening
number two in here, in this poem. Then there are
these: me: you: you there. I’m actually staring up at
you, you know, right here, right from the pool of this page.
Don’t worry where else I am, I am here. Don’t
worry if I’m still alive, you are.” — “Dawn Day One”

“There’s no way back believe me.
I’m writing you from there.” — “Impressionism”

[Barry Wightman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A favorite poet...a book to return to again and again...

[Joe Nasta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Necessary, groundbreaking, form-breaking, mind-changing. Each poem requires commitment, but that commitment is rewarded with revelation and awe.

[Erin Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, intelligent, and heartful. Graham masterfully dances with language, coaxing every syllable into a carefully wrought semblance of poetic balance.

[Cone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pay close attention and do not rush, and Jorie Graham’s best poems will open a door to epiphanies regarding the workings of consciousness and subjectivity.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of beautiful phrases, lines, and passages in Jorie Graham's poetry. Lilting, twisting, unexpected.

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, Ms. Graham is a body of literature from her own country. The amount of her work overwhelms me but I return to savor more of her many landscapes. I understand some of the controversy around her work but the work holds. A remarkable artist who defines herself in her own way, Ms. Graham is rich. This a book to hold close and to explore again and again.

Her work is hard for me to read. She is a difficult poet for me.

[Brian]

Jorie Graham finds the depth and magic in language and expands a clear sense of the moment to its full possibility. This collection allows the reader to sample across the range of her work up to 2014. "For a long time I used to love the word 'now'. I murmured its/ tiniest of songs to myself as a child when alone. 'Now now now/ now' I sang, not much knowing where we were. ". (from Other).