Customer Reviews

Dream Of The Unified Field

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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.

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.

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.

Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems 1974-1994 (Ecco, 1995)

I love Jorie Graham's early work, the wunderkind poems of the seventies that established her as a real force in the world of poetry. Good, solid imagist stuff that tells its tale and gets out:

"...I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on

black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly."
("I Watched a Snake")

A book like this, on the other hand, that goes from the very beginnings of her career to the most recent stuff she'd done at the time shows the journey from that exciting young poet to someone who's gone so far off the rails that one's not terribly sure what to do with her stuff any more. First, the showing stopped and the telling started. Then the experiments (I assume they're experiments) in repetition began. Then came the leaving out of words, or the substitutions of "x" for various nouns. The end result is the long, rambling, boring pieces that make up the latter half of this book.

"Consisting of fountains, yes, but invisible, no?
And of what we spoke of in the dead of _________ once long ago.
And of long ago.
And of the fountains too, no?..."
("Untitled")

(note, as well, these are the only lines in the poem that rhyme.)

Instead of this, I'd suggest picking up the first two books material from this compilation is taken from (Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion), which are both wonderful. As for the rest... well, if the excerpt above didn't drive you nuts, go from there. **

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.

Starting with her splendid beginnings as a voice so uniquely visual that it could only later obsess her, The Dream begins with an explanation of The Way Things Work
and descends (travels sideways and expands like interstellar gas)
into the full-throttle Graham of the middle period,
long lines,
huge gusts of philosophy and sight,
and of course her ever-evolving attempts to cut into cross-sections of the silences air holds and which we bend to try to understand.
This being said, Graham is NOT a poet to be understood in the full sense. Though not as much like Ashbery's word collages as some people like to claim (at least I don't think), her writing certainly benefits from repeated readings. I'm still tramping through the title poem, and have only very recently come to appreciate her next whole (non-collective) book, The Errancy, as a full thing, almost incapable of being dissected into "selections from."
I'm anxious to see what Ecco has in store for her Selected II, which with the recent release of Overlord: Poems, must be coming soon.
In the meantime I will continue to enjoy the eyes of
the most visual poet I've ever seen.

Also, and as a side note, I am very surprised by the exclusion of the poem "To a Friend Going Blind," from Erosion. It's one of her absolute best.

This book works in perfect concordance with the next book she wrote, The Errancy, my favorite of her single volumes.

After reading and re-reading this collection, the first thought that crossed my mind was, "I want something magnificent to happen to me today!" I felt myself dissolving from today and re-emerging into a mythical tomorrow, where words and phrases would be coins of the realm. Graham is the owner magic; spellbinding and lucid and yet swirling together the elements of The Actual and The Figurative; hybrids of each other, till the eventuality of their meanings and intents just simply trade places! Graham's poems are the unravelling of mystery that , in the end, remain more mysterious than ever. And to live, there must always be mystery, lest our lives lose their meanings. I was not the same when I set the book down.

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.

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.

In a selection of her entire life work she picks the best!he remains one of my favorite authors!If you like nature combined with human nature you will love this!