From the New World: Poems 1976-2014

by Jorie Graham

Overview

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

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 Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062315441
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

From Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

Tennessee June 3

Strangers 4

The Geese 6

Over and Over Stitch 8

The Way Things Work 10

An Artichoke for Montesquieu 12

Framing 13

Mirrors 14

Mind 16

New Trees 18

Girl at the Piano 20

From Erosion

San Sepolcro 25

Reading Plato 27

Scirocco 30

I Watched a Snake 34

Wanting a Child 37

My Garden, My Daylight 38

Salmon 40

Of Unevenness 42

Masaccio's Expulsion 44

Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt 48

At Luca Signorell's Resurrection of the Body 52

From the End of Beauty

Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them 59

Orpheus and Eurydice 65

Vertigo 68

On Difficulty 70

What the End Is For 72

Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne 76

Noli Me Tangere 81

Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay 86

Break Dancing 91

Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone 94

Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness 99

From Region of Unlikeness

Fission 105

At The Cabaret Now 111

From the New World 114

The Hiding Place 118

Picnic 121

What is Called Thinking 126

History 130

The Phase After History 135

Soul Says 144

From Materialism

The Surface 147

Notes on the Reality of the Self 148

Notes on the Reality of the Self 150

The Dream of the Unified Field 152

Opulence 160

The Visible World 162

From the Errancy

The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia 169

The Scanning 172

Thinking 176

Studies in Secrecy 178

Le Manteau De Pascal 181

Recovered from the Storm 189

Of the Ever-Changing Agitation in the Air 191

From Swarm

From The Re Formation Journal 195

The Veil 199

Underneath (Sibylline) 202

From the Reformation Journal (2) 206

Prayer 208

Underneath (Calypso) 209

Underneath (13) 212

From Never

Prayer 219

In/Silence 220

Dusk Shore Prayer 222

Gulls 223

Ebbtide 227

Evolution 230

From Overlord

Other 237

Dawn Day One 239

Upon Emergence 242

Soldatenfriedhof 245

Spoken from the Hedgerows 248

Little Exercise 251

Praying (Attempt of May 9 '03) 252

Praying (Attempt of June 14 '03) 256

Impressionism 259

From Sea Change

Sea Change 265

Embodies 268

Guantánamo 270

Later In Life 272

Nearing Dawn 275

Summer Solstice 278

Root End 281

The Violinist at the Window, 1918 284

Futures 287

Undated Lullaby 290

No Long Way Round 293

From Place

Sundown 299

Cagnes Surmer 1950 302

On the Virtue of the Dead Tree 305

The Bird on My Railing 308

The Bird That Begins It 312

End 315

Employment 318

Treadmill 320

Dialogue (Of the Imagination's Fear) 323

Lull 326

Earth 329

Lapse 333

Message from Armagh Cathedral 2011 337

New Poems

Double Helix 345

Honeycomb 350

Fast 352

Prying 355

Notes 361

Editorial Reviews

Ms. Graham is a central figure in the last four decades of American poetry. Her poems, with their long verse lines and Emily Dickinson-like dashes, are as instantly recognizable as Joni Mitchell’s voice on a turntable.” — New York Times, Dwight Garner

“Like the greatest filmmakers, Graham is miraculously gifted at tracing those inexplicable moments that carry a thing — a crow, the sun, a snowflake — from stillness to motion, from wholeness to disintegration and back again.” — Flavorwire

“I know of no living poet whose work so aligns with their reason for writing; I know of no living poet with a better reason for writing poetry.” — Flavorwire

“From the New World is an indispensable addition to any literary library, a tour de force selection of Jorie Graham’s critically important poems to date.” — New York Journal of Books

“A well-curated representation…a long view of the aesthetic development and ethical awakening of one of America’s most important and critically lauded poets…The scale of thought and perception…is a testament to Graham’s work and her willingness to push herself into new territory with each new book.” — Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

“Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.” — New York Times Book Review

“Graham is one of our great poets. Her words will long outlast all this chatter.” — New York Times Book Review

“One of our most important purveyors of the form traces her artistic evolution in this collected work, demonstrating herself to be an eloquent observer of nature and guardian of myth.” — O, the Oprah Magazine

“Graham is a wizard at representing spatial environments, no easy task in a verbal art that largely avoids narrative. . . . There are four new poems here, among the finest that Graham has written.” — The New Yorker

“Graham’s poetry over the decades hasn’t followed a single line of inquiry; rather, like a universe unto itself, it has expanded, broadened, and deepened its questioning, as though total inclusion were the only way to attempt to apprehend the unfathomable.” — Boston Globe

“In 1995, Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book of selected poetry... her latest effort exceeds that one. . . . These poems detach us from comfortable moorings, leaving us pleasantly adrift. Here is exceptional proof that contemporary poetry retains access to the sublime.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch

“I firmly believe that Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last 40 years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

We will always need to read Jorie Graham, and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last 40 years of poetry in America (as well as abroad, where her reputation is only growing)…From the New World is now the place to start. — Los Angeles Review of Books

“Legions of poets have been influenced by Pulitzer Prize-winner Graham over the course of her four-decade career... [These poems] display a continued willingness to experiment and push her art in new directions. — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Graham’s poetry over the decades hasn’t followed a single line of inquiry; rather, like a universe unto itself, it has expanded, broadened, and deepened its questioning, as though total inclusion were the only way to attempt to apprehend the unfathomable.

Boston Globe

From the New World is an indispensable addition to any literary library, a tour de force selection of Jorie Graham’s critically important poems to date.

New York Journal of Books

Ms. Graham is a central figure in the last four decades of American poetry. Her poems, with their long verse lines and Emily Dickinson-like dashes, are as instantly recognizable as Joni Mitchell’s voice on a turntable.

New York Times

Like the greatest filmmakers, Graham is miraculously gifted at tracing those inexplicable moments that carry a thing — a crow, the sun, a snowflake — from stillness to motion, from wholeness to disintegration and back again.

Flavorwire

Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.

New York Times Book Review

Graham is a wizard at representing spatial environments, no easy task in a verbal art that largely avoids narrative. . . . There are four new poems here, among the finest that Graham has written.

The New Yorker

One of our most important purveyors of the form traces her artistic evolution in this collected work, demonstrating herself to be an eloquent observer of nature and guardian of myth.

the Oprah Magazine O

I firmly believe that Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last 40 years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening.

Los Angeles Review of Books

In 1995, Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book of selected poetry... her latest effort exceeds that one. . . . These poems detach us from comfortable moorings, leaving us pleasantly adrift. Here is exceptional proof that contemporary poetry retains access to the sublime.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Graham is a wizard at representing spatial environments, no easy task in a verbal art that largely avoids narrative. . . . There are four new poems here, among the finest that Graham has written.

The New Yorker

One of our most important purveyors of the form traces her artistic evolution in this collected work, demonstrating herself to be an eloquent observer of nature and guardian of myth.

O: the Oprah Magazine

Graham's great body of work, summarized in From the New World, her new career-spanning selected poems…has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing…Among Graham's generational peers…are such aesthetically diverse luminaries as Mark Doty, Charles Bernstein, Brenda Hillman, Yusef Komunyakaa and C. D. Wright. But only Graham has synthesized all of the available strains—the ageless tradition of poetic contemplation; the half-century trend toward self-revelation; the mischievous, self-conscious cynicism about the very proposition of meaningful language—into a style that reflects the real world back, gives powerful moral commentary and makes our hair stand a bit on end because something real glows in each of her poems. Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.

The New York Times Book Review - Craig Morgan Teicher

Ms. Graham is a central figure in the last four decades of American poetry. Her poems, with their long verse lines and Emily Dickinson-like dashes, are as instantly recognizable as Joni Mitchell's voice on a turntable…Her new book, From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, is an important consolidation of her work. It reshuffles but does not essentially alter our sense of her verse…We watch the length of her lines expand and contract. But her voice has barely changed. This is a poet who…arrived almost fully formed…Her poems tend to be difficult, but not in an academic sense. She leads you to the door of comprehension, often enough, only to close it on your ankle. To remain with her, you must be willing to suspend reason and allow her language to flow over you like a syntactic spa treatment…In Ms. Graham's best poems, meaning seems to rush past her. There is real drama in watching her try to catch up to it.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 01/19/2015
Graham’s second selected volume comes two decades after 1995’s Pulitzer-winning The Dream of the Unified Field and offers a well-curated representation of that period and her subsequent six books, along with four new poems. In culling from 11 collections, the volume is necessarily limited in scope, but it succeeds in giving readers—particularly new ones—a long view of the aesthetic development and ethical awakening of one of America’s most important and critically lauded contemporary poets. Here, the tightly composed lines from her early work in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion give way to The End of Beauty’s cinematics, mythologies, and time-exploding lyrics. These give way in turn to Graham’s middle-career search through form and fragmentation, into the burgeoning ethical consciousness of Never and Overlord, finally arriving at the zigzag, stacklike poems of her ecologically minded (and relatively restrained) previous two volumes. What some might consider many of her finest poems are missing here, but the scale of thought and perception—and the arc of arguments that coalesce over the course of this selected—is a testament to Graham’s work and her willingness to push herself into new territory with each new book. For that reason, one wonders, in reading the four new poems, if Graham is again searching for a new form to take her forward. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2014
Pulitzer Prize winner Graham's latest book (after Place) selects poems from 11 of her 16 previous books and adds a few new ones. One can see her style developing from the relatively short lines of her earlier books to the longer, wavelike lines of her later work to her more recent double-string poems, in which the lines on the right meet and greet those on the left. This arrangement works through a clever use of enjambment as the two columns overlap to create three poems: one on the right, one on the left, and another suggested by the connection of the two. The technique works especially well when Graham concerns herself with what in a sense is the real subject of her work: humankind's relationship with the divine: "We call it blossoming—/ the spirit breaks from you and you remain." VERDICT Although Graham never mentions the word Oversoul here, these difficult language poems are suggestive of transcendentalism in its truest sense. Graham may not visit Walden Pond, but she hangs clothes in her backyard, walks in the woods, and tends her garden (among the subjects of the poems here), using these occasions to mark the place where daily life meets the infinite.—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Library Journal