Never: Poems (Hardcover)

by Jorie Graham (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."

With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

If you open and close your eyes
there should be a difference, no, in the way
the thing seen is--in its weight?--and then
what the thinking has begun to make ... because there is, on it, which we've
somehow
introduced, this wash which is duration....
("Philosopher's Stone")

Never is a brilliant example of the struggle to preserve the physical, both in mind and in art. While this notion applies to all artistic endeavors, Graham's poems argue implicitly for preservation since our means of documentation are faulty. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly
The forebodingly absolute title of Graham's ninth collection does not set the tone for all of this book's 27 lyrics, which range over "starlings starting up ladderings of chatter"; an "Editor" and a "Speaking subject" trading stanzas and lines in "Solitude"; the minutes just before, during and after the striking of noon taken up by permutations of "Hunger," and many other eternities in a moment. Less doom-ridden and biblical than 2000's Swarm, Never collects work that appeared in magazines like the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement over the last few years. If the double and triple sets of parentheses "(swarming but swaying in unison, without advancing) (waiting for some arrival) (the channel of them quickening)" and brackets "["protection"] ["money"] [paying them to go away] [gold]" don't seem quite as fresh as when Graham first started using them, they do remain more than a stylistic tic, as she attempts to trace the comings and goings of thought orthographically. Similarly, in moves familiar from previous books, Graham frequently uses terms like "Firstness" and "Subsequence" to carry the conceptual weight the speaker's perceptions, and here stretches them to the point where they signify distance from ordinary life, rather than transcendence of it. More than anything else, this book shows Graham to be a most formidable nature poet, finding in her speaker's environment perfect analogues for states of consciousness: "All day there had been clouds and expectation of sun. It could `break through' anytime, they said." (Apr. 5) Forecast: Graham won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field and this book will generate attention on its own. This is also probably the first time in U.S. history that the country's leading poets are women. Graham, Anne Carson and Louise Glck get most of the press, but look for National Poetry Month profiles and round-up reviews celebrating the achievements of others, including Rae Armantrout, Wanda Coleman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung-Mi Kim, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley and Adrienne Rich all of whom have recent books.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition (April 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060084715
• ISBN-13: 978-0060084714
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,757,662 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars save us, July 1, 2002

By A Customer

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.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Sense of Humor, July 17, 2002

By A Customer

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars pushed forever from behind, April 10, 2002

By	"hirofantv" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

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.