Dream Of The Unified Field

Rating:
Summary: Evoluting and Grahamesque
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Evoluting and Grahamesque
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Spirit of Romanticism...
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: A breathtaking collecton from a brave poet
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: her most lasting book?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: her most lasting book?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: she's not so great
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: its own renaissance sui generis
Review: 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.