About this item
Highlights
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in PoetryFor this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing (1974-1994), Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.In these pages we witness the maturation and evolution of a startling and searching poetic voice.
- Pulitzer Prize (Poetry) 1996 1st Winner
- Author(s): Jorie Graham
- 208 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing (1974-1994), Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.
In these pages we witness the maturation and evolution of a startling and searching poetic voice. The New York Times Book Review described Graham's first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, as announcing "a poet of large ambitions and reckless music."
With each succeeding book, she has enlarged the poems' reach and scope and sought out new thematic and stylistic territory. David St. John, writing in The Los Angeles Times, recognized that, with The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham "emerged as one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets." And of Materialism, he said, "[her] speculative and sensual poetry... echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before."
To the sizable body of praise for her work, James Tate has added, "Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be."
From the Back Cover
The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.
Review Quotes
"Jorie Graham's poems are philosophically and historically alert, and their acts of thought arise with almost instinctual urgency from an astonished responsiveness that in itself becomes part of what she names 'the vivid performance of the present.'... Reaching with quickened sensitivity for poetry's supply of the associative, sonic, and formal properties rustling beyond mere denotation, she also develops a genius for apprehending and scrutinizing human perceptions, reflections, and desires.....Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have." -- New York Times Book Review
"One of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language.... She is like no one else, neither in her rhythms nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space." -- Times Literary Supplement (London)
"This collection, read beginning to end, read as a kind of novel, as a roman, is breathtakingly clear, crystalline, and compelling.... Those of us who knew best the more recent large and complex Graham poems are now invited to reread the earlier, and to see in them, perhaps for the first time, their full complexities and compulsions." -- Boston Review
"Everything comes together here - the voice like the wind that somehow marshalls itself out of kitchen daydreams and prosaic events into utterance that swings with the conviction of Blake's... [Graham] is one of the finest poets writing today." -- John Ashbery
"Graham's complex, faceted poems glint powerfully with compressed energy and suggest another meaning for the term atmospheric pressure." -- Publishers Weekly