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The Taken-Down God
Selected Poems 1997-2008
Jorie Graham
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Discount: 10%
You Save: GBP 1.50
Price: GBP 13.45
Available
Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 847771 94 0
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Published: May 2013
216 x 135 x 8 mm
144 pages
Publisher: Carcanet Press
ISBN: 978 1 847771 94 0
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Published: May 2013
216 x 135 x 8 mm
144 pages
Publisher: Carcanet Press
- Description
- Author
- Contents
- Awards
- Reviews
Acclaimed as one of America’s most passionate and intelligent innovators, Jorie Graham writes poems of luminous formal beauty. Here she selects from the five books that preceded her 2012 Forward Prize-winning collection P L A C E, presenting European readers with a coherent and compelling body of work. The book complements her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field (1996), which selected work from her first five books. Jorie Graham’s poems address a planet spinning towards an unknowable future. They challenge us to inhabit a more responsive and responsible place in language and the world. Her poetry is as urgent as it is essential.
from The Errancy (1997)
The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia
Untitled One
The Guardian Angel of Self-Knowledge
The Scanning
Thinking
That Greater Than Which Nothing
Studies in Secrecy
Le Manteau de Pascal
Recovered from the Storm
Of the Ever-Changing Agitation in the Air
from Swarm (2000)
from The Reformation Journal (1)
The Veil
Underneath (Sibylline)
Middle Distance
Prayer (after Hölderlin)
Underneath (Calypso)
Two Days
The Swarm
from The Reformation Journal (2)
Underneath (13)
from Never (2002)
Prayer
In/Silence
Woods
Dusk Shore Prayer
Gulls
Ebbtide
Evolution [One’s nakedness is very slow]
Evolution [How old are you?]
from Overlord (2005)
Other
Dawn Day One
Soldatenfriedhof
Upon Emergence
Little Exercise
Praying (Attempt of May 9 ’03)
Praying (Attempt of June 14 ’03)
Spoken from the Hedgerows
Impressionism
Praying (Attempt of April 19 ’04)
from Sea Change (2008)
Sea Change
Embodies
Later in Life
Nearing Dawn
Day Off
Root End
The Violinist at the Window, 1918
Futures
Undated Lullaby
No Long Way Round
Notes
Awards won by Jorie Graham
Winner, 2017 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement
Commended, 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
(Fast) Winner, 1996 Pulitzer Prize
(The Dream of the Unified Field) Short-listed, 2012 T S Eliot Prize (P L A C E) Short-listed, 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection (P L A C E)
(Fast) Winner, 1996 Pulitzer Prize
(The Dream of the Unified Field) Short-listed, 2012 T S Eliot Prize (P L A C E) Short-listed, 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection (P L A C E)
Praise for Jorie Graham
'Even when these poems are at their darkest and most purposefully incoherent in terms of voice and tone, there remains a trace of language's ability to seek out, transmit and make visible the impact of the world on the self for others to experience.'
Oxonian Review
'The reason that poets are addicted to poetry and they write it for a lifetime, is because a poem will permit you to go through life and have an experience you can't have by any other means.'
Jorie Graham talking to Ian McMillan on Radio 3's The Verb, 15 December 2017
'Another striking book from Jorie Graham, and one that frequently reaches fever-pitch in its frantic explosion of the lyric mode. Graham's themes in these poems - ranging through sickness, death and environmental crises - would rattle any reader, and her long lines, clamouring fragments and sprawling chorus of voices increase this effect to a dramatic extent. These are urgent, stressed and stressful poems that produce a panicked motion-sickness as you spiral through them. This is an important, desperate and, at times, frightening, book that truly captures the tone of contemporary times.'
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2017
'In FAST, [Graham's] subject is mortality - her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), her parents', that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), that of the planet. It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that, by the end, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the right-hand side of the page. And through it all, an unwavering, serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden's assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.'
The Guardian
'Fast might immerse us in monstrous acts of environmental and political violence, our obsession with progress, money, and our own individualistic, virtual worlds, but what still succeeds is the wish to live on. Perhaps if we were to listen to that wish we might, amongst all the acceleration, stop and think again.'
- The London Magazine
'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. 'Graham's best book in at least a decade.'
Publishers Weekly '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... 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 continuation.'
Helen Vendler, The New Yorker
Oxonian Review
'The reason that poets are addicted to poetry and they write it for a lifetime, is because a poem will permit you to go through life and have an experience you can't have by any other means.'
Jorie Graham talking to Ian McMillan on Radio 3's The Verb, 15 December 2017
'Another striking book from Jorie Graham, and one that frequently reaches fever-pitch in its frantic explosion of the lyric mode. Graham's themes in these poems - ranging through sickness, death and environmental crises - would rattle any reader, and her long lines, clamouring fragments and sprawling chorus of voices increase this effect to a dramatic extent. These are urgent, stressed and stressful poems that produce a panicked motion-sickness as you spiral through them. This is an important, desperate and, at times, frightening, book that truly captures the tone of contemporary times.'
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2017
'In FAST, [Graham's] subject is mortality - her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), her parents', that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), that of the planet. It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that, by the end, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the right-hand side of the page. And through it all, an unwavering, serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden's assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.'
The Guardian
'Fast might immerse us in monstrous acts of environmental and political violence, our obsession with progress, money, and our own individualistic, virtual worlds, but what still succeeds is the wish to live on. Perhaps if we were to listen to that wish we might, amongst all the acceleration, stop and think again.'
- The London Magazine
'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. 'Graham's best book in at least a decade.'
Publishers Weekly '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... 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 continuation.'
Helen Vendler, The New Yorker
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