Customer Reviews

Never: Poems

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While better than her last 2 books--more rooted in objectivity, perception--here too Graham is so mannered that she cariacatures herself relentlessly; she is, at this stage in her labored career, pure cartoon. One is reminded of Gardner's Faults of the Soul, & cannot help wonder if these poems are the ultimate Frankenstein wrought by the factory poetry system of the MFA: a poetry of preciousness, of hyper-articulated stylistic/typographical *ticks* employed in the hopes of masking a shortfall of intellectual courage & spiritual discovery. If looking to have the top of your head taken off, turn to Hillman or Carson, Brock-Broido or Bidart. The most radical thing Graham could do at this point in her life's arc would be to embrace a decade or so of silence, to not publish every self-reflexive utterance. The other worthy task, one senses,would be to abandon all the stylistic bric-a-brac & hiccuping in favor of language itself, to *dare* to be direct, centered in image, lyric in intent.

Jorie Graham's poems often situate the reader at a limit--a physical limit, where land and water co-mingle; or a spiritual limit; or a moral limit, where undecidability finally yields. It seems that the great lushness and beauty of "Never" springs, strangely enough, from Graham's capacity to enforce on herself a long and difficult engagement with various forms of extinction; it's as if, on the very verge of being silenced "forever," a voice were permitted one chance to sing the song that might make amends--that might restore what is about to be gone. If there were such a song, I think it might sound like the poems in "Never"--by turns mournful, self-doubting, defiant, exhilarated, propulsive. Graham's work will always require, and reward, the alert participation of readers, but it is also a poetry that, in its exactness and its reach, has always made me feel that I am being guided into a place beyond my *own* limits. I am grateful to her for doing this service for me and other readers.

Never is one of Jorie Graham's best books. Her previous book, Swarm, was remarkable for its spareness, for the pared-down sentences and lines that still contained intense energy, ferocity, and precision. In Never, Graham brings her interest in precision to the natural world and begins, simply enough, with a series of descriptions of the ecology and the mind apprehending it from moment to moment. These moments of attention, in turn, become moments of prayer and supplication--familiar gestures of Graham's that she addresses with new formal experiments (look at the remarkable line-breaks, for instance) and from an entirely new perspective, as if the pruning of Swarm somehow scoured her language. It's fascinating to follow Graham from book to book because she is always learning something new about her art. Never is brilliant work, full of moments of great beauty and great difficulty, and deeply engaging to read.

The reader (formally, or currently, on Jorie's payroll?) who doesn't know "who Sven Birkerts is" is not much of a reader. Birkerts has written a number of well-acclaimed books. His review of Jorie Graham's book is accurate and fair. Coming to Jorie's defense is silly. It seems like so much personal nonsense, compared to Birkerts review. Let her have her silences and stutters and philosophical failures, and let her embrace them like a good existentialist. But remember, the poetry that survives will be made up of words (besides "I" and "it" and "is"--words that Jorie can't escape in her latest collection). Can anyone recite a line of Graham's poetry since Erosion? Well, why not? Because it's not memorable like good poetry. Actually, the first line of "Estuary" might be good if the poem were comic: "She wondered about the year 1000. She". That would be a good one, but there is NO sense of humor in Graham's poetry. Imagine what James Tate could get out of a line like that. The book is actually very sentimental, and snipingly political, and, dare I say, a bit hypocritical. As if Jorie doesn't love shopping.

Her work is unreadable. It's too bad she abandoned what she had accomplished with Erosion so many years ago. She is good at convincing people of her importance and so no one will tell the truth about her work. If someone does, that person risks being thought of as a bad reader. But there is nothing to nourish the soul in her poems. Nothing to contemplate. They are not even interesting technically. The passionate defenses she generates always make me think of "protesting too much." Her work is like reading impenetrable critical essays. And even critical essays can be written for pleasurable reading, with ease and style. American poetry has gone down a wrong road by following her example.

the poems via negativa, solitude, where-person, exhibit the tired witchery graham has been producing since errancy. the poem where the editor speaks speaks to me of her rivalry with students, she professor of oratory and rhetoric can do no more than to spit at her learners. her radar is poison. the book is boring. She seems to be paranoid about her precious banal use of the language.

In my judgment, Never could be one of Jorie Graham's most important books. It's amazing how she can write this way -- immediately accessible & still syntactically, linguistically, poetically, wholly innovative. Everything she writes by now is controversial, but never doubt her mastery. She revises her poems so many times people would be appalled, making sure that every bit of the music of her poems is exactly as she wants & that she has said & laid out everything she wants to say exactly. These poems are bursts of physical substance, love, passion, & barrages of insight. They move just like universes exploding out of universes. They don't whizz by in a blur, but catch all over. This is a collection of instances that adhere to true devotion, starting with a prayer.

I hope this review has been helpful to you.

Never is a great work of poetry. It is painstaking, original, gorgeously written, brave, and yes, at times difficult. Yes, some great poetry is difficult. It really helps if one reads Graham's previous books -- in particular The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, Materialism, The Errancy, and Swarm. She has been examining our belief structures, our ways of seeing ourselves and making ourselves accountable, through history, myth, autobiography and, now, in this stunning book, the natural world, for quite some time. One needs, perhaps, to follow the journey, to watch the vocabulary and the style develop. There is little to be gained by picking one work over another, one period of Graham's inquiry ovevr another. It is all of a piece, and the thrill is in watching it evolve, as well as in the sheer brilliance and beauty of the individual poems. The structure of each book is, too, quite an act of genius. Watching NEVER, unfold towards its extraordinary final section is a great reading experience, one I haven't had in a long time.

With Swarm, the book before Never, Jorie Graham withheld so much from the reader -- as much as she could, I would say, without the poem completely disintegrating. Here, with Never, as she explains in the first poem in the book, Prayer, she gives as much as she can. In Swarm, there were a lot of veils. Here, she writes often of gold & inlcination. She also writes about nature by really being in the places in her life she's while writing about them. The strongest place in this book is the beach, as Jorie Graham feels that she's at a critical place between different worlds. I don't mean in terms of criticism.

Listen, watching the complexitry of a bird make song she says, "no native immaterial quiver time turns material". Jorie Graham, to me, is one of the greatest visionary poets of our time. The poems in this book are the size of her mind & ambition, massive. They resonate with urgency. Each has such deep background in itself. Jorie Graham has said that to stay creative, you have to erase your path behind you as you proceed. Here, she erases the apocalyptic abstractness of Swarm. SHe's now in a very solid world (or at least aware that there's a solid world around her from which abstraction comes). There's much thought devoted to description. She enjambs after articles a lot. She's also almost always on a beach in this book, where the different worlds of ocean & dry sand meet. The sounds, too, are incredible. A very notable poem, for me, is Solitude, which gives in so much to the truth of thought's constant abstractness. That poem is most like Swarm of anything in this book, but the thinking has moved on. The thinking has moved on.

With the dismantling of poetry she's done with her 3 books since her Pulitzer Prize-winning selected poems, the severe dismantling, one wonders what she'll do next.

Anyone who has read one book by Jories Graham has read them all. This is a one note, one idea, one pose poet. Without the critical establishment behind her, we'd know her real worth.