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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'.
Praise for Jorie Graham:'The poems in Jorie Graham's Sea Change might look unapproachable but they are models of clarity and purity.' - Nicola Smyth, 'Books of the Year', the Independent, 28 December 2008
'One of the finest poets writing today.'
John Ashbery.
'She is among the most important poets in North American literature today.'
Peyton Brien, University of Toronto, 1995.
'Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence.'
James Tate.
'There is a buoyancy in Graham's poetry, a freshness of vision which is rare in contemporary poetry.'
Roger Caldwell, Times Literary Supplement, 27th June 2003
'After each new book by Graham, I wonder what she will do next. Her courage in remaking her style over the years is exemplary.'
Helen Vendler, London Review of Books, 23rd January 2003.
'...to read under Graham's powerful impetus is to have one's consciousness, like molten glass, pulled into unforeseen - and sometimes almost unbearable - shapes.'
Helen Vendler, London Review of Books, 23rd January 2003.
'...one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets. Her speculative and sensual poetry echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before.'
David St. John, The Los Angeles Times, 1996.
'There are erotic poems, elegiac poems, and there are dauntingly difficult, allusive and even impenetrable poems. Throughout there is a powerful, engaging intelligence and an affirming lyric grace.'
Stephen Matterson on The Errancy, in Poetry Ireland Review, vol. 62.
'Like all good poets, she illuminates moments, but 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 within these moments.'
Stephen Burt, Times Literary Supplement, 17th May 1996.
'Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place.'
The Harvard Review.
'A mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its ontinuation.'
Helen Vendler, The New Yorker.
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The hand I placed on you, what if it
