Jorie Graham in the NYT's Limelight

The New York Times's Dwight Garner is at it again, this time with a swirling inspection of Jorie Graham's newest poetry collection: From the New World: Poems 1976-2014. In assessment he writes, "It reshuffles but does not essentially alter our sense of her verse, which has grown somewhat more political and environmentally minded over time. We watch the length of her lines expand and contract. But her voice has barely changed. This is a poet who, for better and sometimes worse, arrived almost fully formed." More:

Wild is the wind that rushes through so many of Jorie Graham’s poems. It sends birds spiraling aloft. It ripples lakes and ponds, making the sun glint. It pushes around the leaves, blades of grass and tree limbs that appear in stanza after stanza. Updraft or downdraft, her gusty poems declare, Hang onto your hat.

These ventilations underline Ms. Graham’s obsession with flux, with impermanence. Truths held dear one moment, her poems imply, become lies in the next. Like the fluttering world, her work resists being caught on anyone’s hook. She is drafty and oracular at the same time. Meaning can be hard to come by. You chase it at your peril, as if it were a sheaf of pages blown onto a highway. The following demand, in a 1993 poem, is very Jorie Graham: “Tell me something and then take it back.”

Ms. Graham is a central figure in the last four decades of American poetry. Her poems, with their long verse lines and Emily Dickinson-like dashes, are as instantly recognizable as Joni Mitchell’s voice on a turntable. She holds an influential position at Harvard, where she replaced Seamus Heaney as the Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory. Her book “The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994” (1996) won a Pulitzer Prize. A sense of brewing drama has clung to her from the start. [...]

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