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Swarm, Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros, and law. The poet confronts a fundamental problem: whom to address, whom there still is to address. She negotiates
passionately with those powers that human beings feel themselves subject to: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love. She remains
'A poet of large ambitions and reckless music, ' as J.D. McClatchy wrote in the New York Times; she
'writes with a meta-physical flair and emotional power.'
'To swarm' is to leave a hive, a home, a stable sense of one's body, a hierarchy of values, in an attempt, apart, to found new forms that will hold. Key players in Graham's drama are the first person, the
enjambement, the phrase, the gap, the sentence. And everywhere, lovers seek the borders they must break as well as those they must at all costs hold. Clytemnestra awaits Agamemnon, Calypso veils Ulysses, Daphne accepts Apollo: figures familiar from her earlier books reappear, eager to plead their stories into sense.
'We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight. If we can't see, with Graham,
"the spots where the birds must eventually land", at least we know now where we should be
looking.' Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement.
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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... Sing, sway, recall
