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What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How -- in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear -- does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an 'other' and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over?
Jorie Graham, in this her most personal and urgent collection to date, undertakes to explore these questions, often from vantage points geographically and historically 'other'. Many of the poems occur along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and the Normandy landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. This work meditates on our new world, ghosted and threatened by competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, 'free'.
"Graham's best book in at least a decade" - Publishers Weekly.
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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Come here. Open your eyes. Open your mouth.
