A review by xterminal
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994 by Jorie Graham
3.0
Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems 1974-1994 (Ecco, 1995)
I love Jorie Graham's early work, the wunderkind poems of the seventies that established her as a real force in the world of poetry. Good, solid imagist stuff that tells its tale and gets out:
“...I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on
black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly.”
(“I Watched a Snake”)
A book like this, on the other hand, that goes from the very beginnings of her career to the most recent stuff she'd done at the time shows the journey from that exciting young poet to someone who's gone so far off the rails that one's not terribly sure what to do with her stuff any more. First, the showing stopped and the telling started. Then the experiments (I assume they're experiments) in repetition began. Then came the leaving out of words, or the substitutions of “x” for various nouns. The end result is the long, rambling, boring pieces that make up the latter half of this book.
“Consisting of fountains, yes, but invisible, no?
And of what we spoke of in the dead of _________ once long ago.
And of long ago.
And of the fountains too, no?...”
(“Untitled”)
(note, as well, these are the only lines in the poem that rhyme.)
Instead of this, I'd suggest picking up the first two books material from this compilation is taken from (Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion), which are both wonderful. As for the rest... well, if the excerpt above didn't drive you nuts, go from there. **
I love Jorie Graham's early work, the wunderkind poems of the seventies that established her as a real force in the world of poetry. Good, solid imagist stuff that tells its tale and gets out:
“...I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on
black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly.”
(“I Watched a Snake”)
A book like this, on the other hand, that goes from the very beginnings of her career to the most recent stuff she'd done at the time shows the journey from that exciting young poet to someone who's gone so far off the rails that one's not terribly sure what to do with her stuff any more. First, the showing stopped and the telling started. Then the experiments (I assume they're experiments) in repetition began. Then came the leaving out of words, or the substitutions of “x” for various nouns. The end result is the long, rambling, boring pieces that make up the latter half of this book.
“Consisting of fountains, yes, but invisible, no?
And of what we spoke of in the dead of _________ once long ago.
And of long ago.
And of the fountains too, no?...”
(“Untitled”)
(note, as well, these are the only lines in the poem that rhyme.)
Instead of this, I'd suggest picking up the first two books material from this compilation is taken from (Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion), which are both wonderful. As for the rest... well, if the excerpt above didn't drive you nuts, go from there. **