Never

by Jorie Graham

Overview

“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.”—New York Times Book Review

A vibrantly focused and intense collection of verse from Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field.

…I am free to go.

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Deftly meditating on nature, spirit, and imagination, Never showcases one of America’s most gifted and respected poets at the height of her creativity. These graceful, probing poems, distinguished by long, meticulously sculpted, almost muscular lines, are among the finest and most innovative compositions in the genre today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060084721
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/04/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	7.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Read an Excerpt

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change --
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Afterwards

I am beneath the tree. To the right the river is melting the young sun. And translucence itself, bare, bony, feeding and growing on the manifest, frets in the small puddles of snowmelt sidewalks and frozen lawns holdup full of sky. From this eternity, where we do not resemble ourselves, where resemblance is finally beside (as the river is) the point, and attention can no longer change the outcome of the gaze, the ear too is finally sated, starlings starting up ladderings of chatter, all at once all to the left, invisible in the pruned-back hawthorn, heard and heard again, and yet again differently heard, but silting the head with inwardness and making always a dispersing but still coalescing opening in the listener who cannot look at them exactly, since they are invisible inside the greens -- though screeching-full in syncopations of yellowest, fine-thought, finespun rivering of almost-knowables. "Gold" is too dark. "Featherwork" too thick. When two appear in flight, straight to the child-sized pond of melted snow, and thrash, dunk, rise, shake, rethrashing, reconfiguring through reshufflings and resettlings the whole body of integrated featherwork, they shatter open the blue-and-tree-tip filled-up gaze of the lawn’s two pools, breaking and ruffling all the crisp true sky we had seen living down in that tasseled earth. How shall we say this happened? Something inaudible has ceased. Has gone back round to an other side of which this side’s access was [is] this width of sky deep in just-greening soil? We left the party without a word. We did not change, but time changed us. It should be, it seems, one or the other of us who is supposed to say -- lest there be nothing -- here we are. It was supposed to become familiar (this earth). It was to become "ours." Lest there be nothing? Lest we reach down to touch our own reflection here? Shouldn’t depth come to sight and let it in, in the end, as the form the farewell takes: representation: dead men: lean forward and look in: the raggedness of where the openings are: precision of the limbs upthrusting down to hell: the gleaming in: so blue: and that it has a bottom: even a few clouds if you keep attending: and something that’s an edge-of: and mind-cracks: and how the poem is about that: that distant life: I carry it inside me but can plant it into soil: so that it becomes impossible to say that anything swayed from in to out: then back to "is this mine, or yours?": the mind seeks danger out: it reaches in, would touch: where the subject is emptying, war is: morality play: preface: what there is to be thought: love: begin with the world: let it be small enough.

Never. Copyright © by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

[Never] shows Graham to be a most formidable nature poet, finding…perfect analogues for states of consciousness.” — PublishersWeekly

“Graham’s inventive, gracefully longitudinal, lush yet demanding meditations on the nature of being are exquisitely piquant and affecting.” — Booklist

“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.” — New York Times Book Review

“Graham is one of the most important living poets, and her control of her craft is undisputed.” — Library Journal

“[Never] declares that the artistic task of becoming, once begun, continues on.” — New York Times Book Review

"Graham is one of those rare poets who not only has created a language and poetic structure all her own, but who seeks to redefine herself with each new book. Restless, unsatisfied, hungering for a further truth, she offers mediations in Never that are nothing less than dazzling." — San Diego Union-Tribune

"Her syntax fires like synapses. Take her labyrinthine poems the way Frost said to look at a star that fades when stared at. If we focus on a spot beside it, the light will swim into the eye and, as Graham words it, 'silver into place.'" — Seattle Weekly

"Sinuous beauty, and a wild, wide-ranging intellect—a sense of relentless inquiry hums beneath the surface of every line.... One of the most moving books of her career." — Vogue

From the Publisher

[Never] shows Graham to be a most formidable nature poet, finding…perfect analogues for states of consciousness.

PublishersWeekly

Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.

New York Times Book Review

Graham’s inventive, gracefully longitudinal, lush yet demanding meditations on the nature of being are exquisitely piquant and affecting.

Booklist

Graham’s inventive, gracefully longitudinal, lush yet demanding meditations on the nature of being are exquisitely piquant and affecting.

Booklist

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 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Graham's ninth collection continues along the same ambitious curve as her prior two works, Errancy and Swarm, using flux and interruption as both form and topic. Many of these poems occur at the ocean's edge, where the play of surfaces becomes a canvas for the poet's conceptualizations; sunlight, to Graham, is as "golden sentences writ on clearest moving waters." There is the unmistakable sound of the late A.R. Ammons in places and an Ammons-like use of the colon as a fulcrum to balance thoughts. But unlike Ammons, Graham eschews wit, unadorned statement, and resolution, and her lines can be hard to penetrate: "[or onto my feet, then into my eyes] where red turns into `sun' again./ So then it's sun in surf-breaking water: encircling, smearing: mind not/ knowing if it's still `wave,' breaking on/ itself." It is as if the poem tries so hard to exist in the moment of its own creation that it implodes, like matter into a black hole. The most accessible poems include "The Taken-Down God," a description of worshipers at an Easter rite in Umbria in which the poet (like most of us) can't quite keep up with "real time." Despite the difficulties, Graham is an important poet, which recommends her work for most poetry collections. Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal