Jorie Graham, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-94. Her other collections include The End of Beauty, P L A C E and Runaway. To 2040 came out in 2023.
I took off my glasses& pocketed them.I took out my eyes& tossed them up
for the crows to catch& turn tonotes. I feltthe wind. The one crow
landing on the rankingbranch. Staringat me. Feltthat. It was all
flowing now. I made
my way to where I was to jointhe others. The otherswere all alreadythere. There was
chanting, there were orders, the instructions wereloud. Impatiencemade itself at...
filled the fields. The way forward filled with the wayback. Are those humans out there orjust hollows filled with mercury & ash.When it comes into view the mountain is cleaved open.The silver is picked out.Thousands of them with their instruments up against the face ofthe rock. Their bodies break & they are replaced.Is it BC or AD. The years break & they arereplaced. The event...
everyone woke up. It was a gorgeous sunny day. The lists with our names on them were laid out in the light. Someone straightened the pile. Are they complete I heard a voice ask though it was awfully far away from the beautiful day. Which was a masterpiece. Something’s apogee. A hegemon, a crystallisation – a gigantic re-beginning. We will all be trans- formed I heard myself think....
A hand or something likea handappeared in the uppersky & Isaw what must have beenits fingers un-furl & drop two ice-whitedice which begantheir slowtumbling each over eachdown till they turnedto wings draggedby the weight oftheir bodies down & thenall the new &improvedviruses shook out theirmutationsas they fell, as theysprinkled down & dustedus – in-candescent –...
If I bring this voiceIf I came backagain when Icome backagain if again it ispossible required withthis voice still this voice so narrow itspassage still untrustworthy, too deep therequest, too slippery theladdering of –what was the tongue –cold – arrowing – may it notbe English – if they inviteme back – some morninglike thisafter historyif they drag meback...
For Jorie Graham, the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic...
The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...
Famous poems, like faces, are a particularly memorable kind of introduction to the person they conceal. Like other kinds of introduction, they are often what we remember a person for, or what we...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.