Dream Of The Unified Field [Hardcover]

Jorie Graham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 1995

The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This collection of Jorie Graham's poetry spans twenty years of writing with selections from her five previous volumes of poetry, including Erosion and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

From Publishers Weekly

Graham's complex, faceted poems glint powerfully with compressed energy and suggest another meaning for the term atmospheric pressure. Her rendering of experience yields a dense, layered vision in which simplicity is rarely found and conclusions are likely to be double-edged. In "Imperialism," concerned with shadows and a difficult relationship, she recalls being taken to Calcutta as a child where, "to know the world," she must observe the funeral pyres and later step into the Ganges ("utensils and genitalia and incandescent linens?(I was nine)?"). Elsewhere a photo of a Holocaust atrocity takes on, in its description and its context, a necessary semblance of beauty: "'I'll give ten thousand dollars to the man/ who proves the holocaust really/ occurred,'" she quotes. Themes and imagery recur: birds, angels, wings, madness; hands at work, passions political and personal. Graham's keen interest in paintings yields a continual shifting of the thin border between art and life. In "The Phase After History," two birds trapped inside a house?which suggests self-consciousness or a page?fly at the windows seeking escape, while on one floor a man takes up a knife to slice off his face. Too compact for a single reading, this selection from previous collections provides several "self portraits" that help give her thought grounding. This volume is perfectly orchestrated, each poem extending the poem before it.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 199 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition (November 21, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880014385
• ISBN-13: 978-0880014380
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #748,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Spirit of Romanticism..., September 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dream Of The Unified Field (Paperback)

Perhaps the most common indictment made about any of Graham's works is that they are too philosophical and complex--so complex that they distance themselves from the common reader ("reader," these days, meaning someone who expects to understand a poem on the first or second reading).

But it would be a great blunder to dismiss her poetry simply because of its complex nature. To me, Graham is a Romantic, in every sense of the word: she writes about everyday experiences (as Wordsworth insisted upon), but then allows these experiences to "move" down the page in an unmistakibly fluid-like fashion. By allowing these experiences to transcend their just being "experiences," Graham allows room for more important, more intellectual, themes to be raised. And while doing this, she maintains firm control over the emotional energies of her poems (and over language itself).

When reading one of Graham's more complex pieces (such as those from "Materialism" & "The End of Beaty"), one shouldn't be tricked into thinking that two or three readings alone will provide a clear understanding of the text. Graham forces the reader to read the poems aloud, and to make connections between stanzas and lines (even words) that might otherwise seem disoriented or abstract.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A breathtaking collecton from a brave poet, June 19, 2001

By 

"50cent-haircut" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Of The Unified Field (Paperback)

Jorie Graham is a poet who is not afraid to tackle big ideas and themes. One of the most disconcerting trends in poems I've read in literary magazines these days is this shying away from intellectualism. So many poems are "look what many epiphanies I can unearth just from my small private world." If you have a violent reaction against these kinds of poems, Jorie Graham's poetry is that antidote you have been searching.

She is not afraid to tackle big themes, metaphysical and epistemological. She doesn't hide the fact that she has a sharp, fiercely intelligent mind. But it's not just mere verbal pyrotechnics. She lets her knowledge surface through everyday events observed through her keen eyes, filtered through her sensations. In "Reading Plato", for example, her vision of the platonic community becomes summoned magically, and almost improbably through the sight of men in early morning... fishing at the lake, casting bait into the water, and the horse hair that's attached to it. In other poems, she relates a spiritual surge of St. Theresa to a breakdancer dancing on the street, electricity that seems to run through the dancers bones and limbs.

These and many others are startling observations which lead not to easy, pat conclusions and denouements, but to further philosophical inquiries. No other poet I've read recently has drawn out so much from such minute, exacting observations. A work of a genius.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Conundrum, September 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dream Of The Unified Field (Hardcover)

The mystery, really, is two mysteries: how someone so abundantly skilled can fall so far; and second, why? The St. Louis reviewer overstates the case a bit, but the Bostonian is as muddled as he/she is a rummy typist. Basically, Ms. Graham is a stunningly fine poet who has given up on the impulse to break the reader's heart and given in, sadly, to the impulse to baffle with erudition and drop savory hints to theorists along the way. Imagine if Keats had made a similar choice. Though, if he had, we wouldn't know his name by now anyway.

Do buy this book. Read the poem "Salmon," from Graham's second collection, EROSION. It's lovely and affecting. Read "Kimomo." Indeed, as the St. Louis person says, after that it's downhill, but there's a kind of literary/aesthetic-Leaving-Las-Vegas fascination to it anyway. It may bring out a certain rage in you or merely disgust. Hell, you may even "like" it, though that seems an odd response to such antiseptically brainy and otherwise void constructions.

Good luck.