This Jorie Graham's 3rd book was her first time writing the huge avant-garde housed in her mind. James Tate describes her well as "staggeringly brilliant." Each word in this book spans forever in every direction. Each poem is so massive, so dense. They take a lot out of you, but they reward incredibly. Fracturing & stretching, reaching & grasping. This book is an experience.

or maybe that should be "a galaxy of its own...." Every poem in this book is enormous -- dense, generally three or four pages long -- pure terrifying brilliance. This is the most terrifying book I've ever read. The poems are all that inelligent. It takes a lot from you to read it, but it gives back much more. She uses her uncompromising, undisputed formal mastery in The End of Beauty to create something necessarily avant-garde, totally unique. Flawless, utterly magnificent in every jerking twist & nuance & flare. The lines explode in myriad different diferent directions like shrapnel, shrapnel, & bring back more scope than you've ever encountered in one place before with sure victory. She knows how to show rather than tell & how to tell when there's the best way.

In THE END OF BEAUTY, Graham offers us a delicious deconstruction of our mythical histories, our culture, and our art. It puzzles me that few people--even poetry buffs--don't take to her poetry more kindly. For hardly any other contemporary poet--on this side of the Atlantic, anyway--tackles such philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic issues with as much vigor as Graham.

Graham's handling of great art and twice-told tales is refreshing in its idiosyncratic usage (and criticism) of postmodern conventions. Reading this book, one cannot fail to see the connections between Graham and Donne, Graham and Derrida, Graham and Ashbery. It's important, I think, especially for readers who fail to grasp many of her ideas, to envision Graham's poetry as part of a much greater discourse between metaphysics and history.

In "Orpheus and Eurydice," Graham retells the story of the mythological lovers, but through the eyes of Eurydice herself, as she vanishes into thin air forever. And in "Breakdancing," she splices together scenes of Saint Teresa's ecstatic prayers in Avila, and breakdancers on a city sidewalk, thus delineating the sense of a multiple reality.

The book will surely leave you with a heightened appreciation for art, as well as art's role in defining and redefining the world.

So this is her first book, from 1974. The way Jorie Graham feels now is that you'll have to pardon the youth of it. This book won't give you an idea of all the other amazing developments she's had in her career, for herself & for western poetry, but it is a showcase for her brilliant mind for metaphor & the sounds of poetry among other things. It'll show you how she started as a poet, so you can understand better her development as a poet. Besides that, it still gets 5 stars anyway for the brilliant, brilliant metaphor & thoughts throughout.

So when she first took up the craft of poetry, this is what she did. The poetics of the writing are not as difficult as her later work, but the thoughts are still huge concrete slabs of serious intelligence. It's still difficult, if not in precisely the same way as her later work, & it was clear from this book -- from the first few poems in this book -- that she had gigantic poetry inside her.

This poetry is less compicated than Ms.Graham's newer poems.Though they still have that charm and profound ideas expressed in the most beautiful poetic language ever!Spring the few dollars for some poetic delight!

Barron's photographs and Graham's poetry compliment each other beautifully. The photographs are breathtaking; after flipping through a few pages you want to decorate your home in Barron's work. I have had this book for several years, and continue to treasure it.

I bought this book several years ago and I just love it. The photographs are just breathtaking. I highly reccommend this book to anyone who enjoys delicate poetry or appreciates art or photography. Barron, the photographer, has this subtle and amazingly artful eye and you leave the book wanting to decorate your home with her work. This is a must-have!

Another beautifully printed book from Scalo. Pulitzer prize -winning Graham's sparse verse is not only inspired, but enhanced by Mongomery Barron's pristine imagery.Her (Barron's) still life photographs are not merely decorative interperatations of form, texture and tone. Each image is a poem,a meditation, a complex expression of pure beauty and eerie silence.

This is where she really mastered poetry, with the infinite elliptical loop & music & self-awareness & endless mysteriousness of Salmon, & in other poems playing, with great precision, with who the speaker is, & doing so much more with the book as a whole. With her first book it was clear that she would be a very special poet, & with this her second she absolutely mastered so many aspects of poetry in such a visionary way that she could confidently proceed from there to the wild avant-garde of her third book, The End of Beauty, & beyond. Reading Erosion, you can tell it's before she broke into the later experimentation she's now famous for. The style is very different. Here the lines are usually shorter; the themes are ambitious ("History" -- including but not focusing on a pitchfork opening slow holes in someone), but not as ambitious as later; the poems are shorter. But I think in poems in Erosion when she says things like "how clean the mind is" while commenting briefly on lemon skins, & elsewhere has a garment closing "from privacy to eternity" one could tell how brilliant she was & how limitless her poetry could be. It's all larger in ambition & scope than her first book. She was progressing already, as at the beginning of a parabolic curve not far out yet from the vertex.

EROSION, Graham's second volume of poems, is quite different from any other she has published. The poems themselves are strung elegantly like a pearl necklace. Each is quite linear in appearance and tone, crafted with clever, audible rhythms and rhymes. Most of the poems focus on a particular artist or saint or philospher--which is refreshing for those of us who bore easily of traditional nature poetry. Taken together, the poems, like many of those in recent book SWARM, deal with the seen & the unseen, the real & the imagined, the actual & the conceptual. EROSION is a bold step outward in American poetry.

The poems in this book average about 10 pages long & focus incisively on philosophical questions with Jorie Graham's unique poetic perspective.

"A good poem is always a reaction, a moment of acute surprise that occurred in the soul of the speaker." Jorie Graham explores the natural and manmade world through a series of exceptionally well-crafted poems. Her voice is unique yet familiar, both strongly intellectual and intuitively inchoate.

Of her work James Tate has said: "Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be."

This anthology is a must-have for those who love poetry. Jorie has compiled a wide range of poems, from the anonymously written (ca 1000, UK) "Earth Took of Earth" to a selection from Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight", and everywhere in between. Jorie's introduction sums it up well: "The poets here are rich and poor, they die young, they live to be old, they are gay, straight, married, consumptive, alcoholic, secular, religious -- their fathers beat them, their mothers scare them, they are loved madly, they are raped and tortured, they live quiet domestic lives, they die in trenches, they live in exile, in jail, in pretty suburban houses -- they teach, sell shoes, work in gas stations, in museums, in defense factories, in kitchens -- they are explorers, seducers, upstanding citizens, fascists, Marxists, visionaries, lunatics. They live all this out in one beautiful everchanging language -- of vocables, of forms, of assumptions, of beliefs, of idioms -- all sinewed by depth of soul, love of words, and an extraordinary capacity for original honest emotion." This book is a deligt to read as well as an excellent resource.

while her poetry isn't the worst i've read, graham's isn't that great... her poems drag on, all could be cut by about half or even a third. she seems to forget just what the english language can do in the hands of a master, because her poems are flat and i've heard of people talking about her work being difficult. i think they confuse difficult with nothing to say.

Since Jorie Graham is so innovative, of course she's controversial. Don't be fooled. Her books since since The Dream of the Unified Field have each been major achievements for the poet & significantly innovative for poetry; this book contains many of her most important earlier works & shows the immense development in the first 5 books of a poet for whom each book is a critical examination & leap beyond everything she has done before. This poetry is really intense. More & more, every poem is so monumental. Her mastery is undisputed. Her visionary brilliance is evident. Every creative product of hers is very major; this is perhaps the book that will be her most lasting since this is the one she got the Pulitzer Prize for.

With The Dream of the Unified Field, Jorie Graham lays bare her mission to lift the entire flowing river of poetry like the Nile or a useful toothpick & change its course to somewhere no one but she could have dreamed, but where it needed to go. From her early, formative poetry that showed a remarkable depth, clarity, & potential to the absolute mastery of quasi-formalist poetry to her exploding into true avant-garde where her genius belongs to the Renaissance-immersion & freedom of cultivated uniqueness & finally to her most massive, ambitious writing to that point, she seems to possess a nimbus of poetic exaction that few people can par with & nobody but she could sculpt just how it is. She constructs, somewhat early on, an infinite loop of enigma & perfect sound, in the poem Salmon. She examines freedom change, "a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere" with the first poem from _The End of Beauty_, Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them. Then her later works start to get more complex -- more alluring, to some.

Graham seems too involved with the imagery and particularly the style of the late poetry of Wallace Stevens. E.g., "An Ordinary Evening at New Haven."

. . . or John Ashbery, or Wallace Stevens for that matter? Why is 'difficult' and 'complex' poetry suspect these days? Perhaps people are just so used to mediocrity that they can't be engaged by close, careful readings anymore. Writers like Graham are the ones who save the English language from such banalities. I appreciate Graham's many departures and returns, in the trans/parence of many of her pieces in this collection. Most of all, I appreciate its guardian angelship, the assured (w)holeness of the book.

Yes, Graham's The Errancy is in the spirit of Stevens and Ashbery--perhaps even inheriting their spirits--and what's wrong with that? This is my favorite book from a poet who has transformed American poetry--like Ashbery and Stevens before him--and has become in my mind the single greatest poet in the English language. The book is a chore and a treat--I recommend it very highly!

An all-poetry anthology, featuring the very best established and up-and-coming contemporary American writers. CONJUNCTIONS:35 American Poetry: States of the Art

FALL, 2000 Edited by Bradford Morrow

Table of contents

John Ashbery, Four Poems

Lyn Hejinian, Two Poems

Myung Mi Kim, Siege Document

Brenda Coultas, Three Poems

Arthur Sze, Quipu

Jorie Graham, Six Poems

Michael Palmer, Three Poems

Mark McMorris, Reef: Shadow of Green

Susan Wheeler, Each's Cot An Altar Then

Ann Lauterbach, Three Poems

Clark Coolidge, Arc of His Slow Demeanors

Gustaf Sobin, Two Poems

Alice Notley, Four Poems

Tessa Rumsey, The Expansion of the Self

Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, Two Landscapes

Forrest Gander, Voiced Stops

Tan Lin, Ambient Stylistics

Marjorie Welish, Delight Instruct

Laynie Browne, Roseate, Points of Gold

James Tate, Two Poems

Honor Moore, Four Poems

Leslie Scalapino, From The Tango

Bin Ramke, Gravity & Levity

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Two Poems

Charles Bernstein, Reading Red

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein, A Dialogue

Rosmarie Waldrop, Five Poems

Martine Bellen, Two Poems

Peter Sacks, Five Poems

Reginald Shepherd, Two Poems

Barbara Guest, Two Poems

Donald Revell, Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century

Paul Hoover, Resemblance

Elaine Equi, Five Poems

Norma Cole, Conjunctions

Jena Osman, Boxing Captions

Ron Silliman, Fubar Clus

John Yau, Three Movie Poems

Melanie Neilson, Two Poems

Robert Kelly, Orion: Opening the Seals

Nathaniel Mackey, Two Poems

C.D. Wright, From One Big Self

Peter Gizzi, Fin Amor

Carol Moldaw, Festina Lente

Charles Norton, Five Poems

Robert Creeley, Supper

Brenda Shaughnessy, Three Poems

Malinda Markham, Four Poems

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow

Nathaniel Tarn, Two Poems

Peter Cole, Proverbial Drawing

Fanny Howe, Splinter

Anne Tardos, Four Plus One K

Robert Tejada, Four Poems

Andrew Mossin, The Forest

Elizabeth Willis, Two Poems

David Shapiro, Two Poems

Camille Guthrie, At the Fountain

Susan Howe, From Preterient

Cole Swensen, Seven Hands

Susan Howe and Cole Swensen, A Dialogue

Keith Waldrop, A Vanity

Will Alexander, Fishing as Impenetrable Stray

Juliana Spahr, Blood Sonnets

Jerome Sala, Two Poems

Leonard Schwartz, Ecstatic Persistence

Catherine Imbriglio, Three Poems

Vincent Katz, Two Poems

Thalia Field, Land at Church City

John Taggart, Not Egypt

Renee Gladman, The Interrogation

Laura Moriarty, Seven Poems

Kevin Young, Film Noir

Jackson Mac Low, Five Stein Poems

Rae Armantrout, Four Poems

Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space