Carcanet Press - Overlord

Description
Excerpt
Author
Contents
Awards
Reviews

Come here. Open your eyes. Open your mouth.
The years that enter us are also visitors.
For the host we must make extra accommodations.
As in open your mouth. Become an actor. Act.

from 'Communion'

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How - in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear - does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an 'other' and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over?

Jorie Graham, in this her most personal and urgent collection to date, undertakes to explore these questions, often from vantage points geographically and historically 'other'. Many of the poems occur along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and the Normandy landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. This work meditates on our new world, ghosted and threatened by competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, 'free'.

Table of Contents

OTHER

DAWN DAY ONE

PRAYING (Attempt of June 8 '03)

SOLDATENFRIEDHOF

PRAYING (Attempt of June 6 '03)

UPON EMERGENCE

LITTLE EXERCISE

PRAYING (Attempt of May 9 '03)

OMAHA

PRAYING (Attempt of June 14 '03)

SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS

SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS

SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS

DISENCHANTMENT

EUROPE (Omaha Beach 2003)

IMPRESSIONISM

PHYSICIAN

DISENCHANTMENT

PRAYING (Attempt of Feb 6 '04)

PASSENGER

COMMUTE SENTENCE

COPY

PRAYING (Attempt of April 19 '04)

COMMUNION

POSTERITY

NOTES

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received ... read more

Awards won by Jorie Graham Long-listed, 2024 The Griffin Poetry Prize
(To 2040) Winner, 2023 The Laurel Prize
(To 2040) Commended, 2022 A Poetry Book Society Autumn Special Commendation
([To] the Last [Be] Human) Short-listed, 2021 The ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing
(Runaway) Short-listed, 2020 The Neustadt International Prize for Literature
(Fast) Winner, 2018 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (Fast) Winner, 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection (PLACE) Winner, 2017 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement Commended, 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
(Fast) Winner, 1996 Pulitzer Prize
(The Dream of the Unified Field) Short-listed, 2012 T S Eliot Prize () Short-listed, 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection ()

'Graham's best book in at least a decade.'
Publishers Weekly Praise for Jorie Graham 'This is an urgent, vivacious book based in stark reality but written with craft and beauty.'
Maria Crawford, Financial Times
'To 2040 is a collection to be experienced in all its movements and formations. It articulates the collective undercurrents of our consciousness, leading us beyond the brinks of our experience, flooding us with existential concerns and threats. To 2040 further cements the might of Jorie Graham's poetic work and her immense, oracular vision, which is as astonishing as it is necessary.'
Neha Mulay, The Adroit Journal
'Graham is adept at this kind of philosophical, or, indeed neo-scientific, display... The result is blistering and overwhelming, a clear depiction of our extreme, accelerating existence.'
Kate Simpson, The Poetry Review
'The poems are invigorating in their formal inventiveness and precise use of language. The surprising lineation, extension of white space, erosion of words (you/u) and accretion of phrases have the effect of tuning us into Grahamâs mind; we follow her thoughts as she wrestles with our wilful destruction of the earth, shot through with images of hope.'
Jo Dixon, Everybody's Reviewing
'The American writer's visionary 15th collection is one of her best books yet. These luminous poems consider the importance of attending to the wisdom nature offers us... A profound engagement with how our thinking about nature might change, and transform us in the process.'
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
'Of the many questions put throughout Jorie Graham's stunning new collection, To 2040, the first is the most urgent: "Are we / extinct yet."...The common shape of poems here is a precisely unbalanced four-line stanza: seldom do lines and phrases match, sentences spill across lines. It is the flow of intellect, the mind at work.'
Stephen Sexton, Irish Times
'In her new book, Graham's poems continue to exhort us to be present, and she has found a startlingly intimate way of situating an individual consciousness among its precarious cohabitants.'
Walt Hunter, The Atlantic
'What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualising the future.... Every poem is an attempt at orientation - sometimes within a disorienting void. However considered Graham's revisions, the sense is of being in the moment with her - intimacy the closest thing to consolation.'

Kate Kellaway, The Observer

'Attempting to comment briefly on this visionary commotion is like trying to capture thunder and lightning in a bottle... This is a world beyond humanity, beyond nature, beyond culture, and yet amid the ruins there is the undeniable triumph and power of poetic utterance'

Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement

'From its opening page until its final lines, Graham''s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer's debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow their banks...Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on...'

Jeff Gordinier, New York Times

'Sweeping lines and fractured phrases, ampersands and italics, lines unexpectedly justified right: all of these wake us up to 'the freshness of what's / there.'

Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

'Her most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go. . . . She in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you sense what it is you're letting go of, now, before it's gone.'

Harper's Magazine
'Runaway, Jorie Graham's expansive new book, insistently tunes us to the human urgency for wholeness, for the meanings of embodiment in a time when some of us/are murdered, and some of have mouths that keep saying yes.'

Forrest Gander, New York Times

'Even when these poems are at their darkest and most purposefully incoherent in terms of voice and tone, there remains a trace of language's ability to seek out, transmit and make visible the impact of the world on the self for others to experience.'
Oxonian Review

'The reason that poets are addicted to poetry and they write it for a lifetime, is because a poem will permit you to go through life and have an experience you can't have by any other means.'
Jorie Graham talking to Ian McMillan on Radio 3's The Verb, 15 December 2017

'Another striking book from Jorie Graham, and one that frequently reaches fever-pitch in its frantic explosion of the lyric mode. Graham's themes in these poems -ranging through sickness, death and environmental crises -would rattle any reader, and her long lines, clamouring fragments and sprawling chorus of voices increase this effect to a dramatic extent. These are urgent, stressed and stressful poems that produce a panicked motion-sickness as you spiral through them. This is an important, desperate and, at times, frightening, book that truly captures the tone of contemporary times.'
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2017

'In FAST, [Graham's] subject is mortality - her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), her parents', that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), that of the planet. It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that, by the end, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the right-hand side of the page. And through it all, an unwavering, serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden's assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.'
The Guardian

'Fast might immerse us in monstrous acts of environmental and political violence, our obsession with progress, money, and our own individualistic, virtual worlds, but what still succeeds is the wish to live on. Perhaps if we were to listen to that wish we might, amongst all the acceleration, stop and think again.'
- The London Magazine

'We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight. If we can't see, with Graham, "the spots where the birds must eventually land", at least we know now where we should be looking.'
Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement. 'The poems in Jorie Graham's Sea Change might look unapproachable but they are models of clarity and purity.'
Nicola Smyth, 'Books of the Year', the Independent, 28 December 2008
'There are erotic poems, elegiac poems, and there are dauntingly difficult, allusive and even impenetrable poems. Throughout there is a powerful, engaging intelligence and an affirming lyric grace.'
Stephen Matterson on The Errancy, in Poetry Ireland Review, vol. 62

Quote of the Day It is impossible to imagine literary life in Britain without Carcanet. William Boyd Home Events Authors Titles Paperback Hardback Limited Edition Journal CD eBook Audiobook Exact Editions Imprints Anvil Press Poetry Aspects of Portugal Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Carcanet Poetry Fyfield Books Little Island Press Lives and Letters Northern House OxfordPoets PN Review Information About Us PN Review Turns 50 Years Old! Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! Academic Enquiries Authors for Events Catalogue Contact Us Copyright and Permissions Join Our Mailing List Opportunities at Carcanet Press Enquiries PN Review PN Review Creative Writing Prize Returns Policy Shopping Guide Stocklist Submission Guidelines Trade Information Resources Audio Gallery Reading Group Guides Video
Book Search Search > advanced search Subscribe to our mailing list
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas. Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.
Overlord Jorie Graham Categories: American, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (128 pages) (Pub. Oct 2005) 9781857548204 Out of Stock Description Excerpt Author Contents Awards Reviews Come here. Open your eyes. Open your mouth. The years that enter us are also visitors. For the host we must make extra accommodations. As in open your mouth. Become an actor. Act. from 'Communion' What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How - in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear - does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an 'other' and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over? Jorie Graham, in this her most personal and urgent collection to date, undertakes to explore these questions, often from vantage points geographically and historically 'other'. Many of the poems occur along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and the Normandy landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. This work meditates on our new world, ghosted and threatened by competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, 'free'. Table of Contents OTHER DAWN DAY ONE PRAYING (Attempt of June 8 '03) SOLDATENFRIEDHOF PRAYING (Attempt of June 6 '03) UPON EMERGENCE LITTLE EXERCISE PRAYING (Attempt of May 9 '03) OMAHA PRAYING (Attempt of June 14 '03) SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS SPOKEN FROM THE HEDGEROWS DISENCHANTMENT EUROPE (Omaha Beach 2003) IMPRESSIONISM PHYSICIAN DISENCHANTMENT PRAYING (Attempt of Feb 6 '04) PASSENGER COMMUTE SENTENCE COPY PRAYING (Attempt of April 19 '04) COMMUNION POSTERITY NOTES Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received ... read more Awards won by Jorie Graham Long-listed, 2024 The Griffin Poetry Prize (To 2040) Winner, 2023 The Laurel Prize (To 2040) Commended, 2022 A Poetry Book Society Autumn Special Commendation ([To] the Last [Be] Human) Short-listed, 2021 The ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing (Runaway) Short-listed, 2020 The Neustadt International Prize for Literature (Fast) Winner, 2018 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (Fast) Winner, 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection (PLACE) Winner, 2017 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement Commended, 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. (Fast) Winner, 1996 Pulitzer Prize (The Dream of the Unified Field) Short-listed, 2012 T S Eliot Prize () Short-listed, 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection () 'Graham's best book in at least a decade.' Publishers Weekly Praise for Jorie Graham 'This is an urgent, vivacious book based in stark reality but written with craft and beauty.' Maria Crawford, Financial Times 'To 2040 is a collection to be experienced in all its movements and formations. It articulates the collective undercurrents of our consciousness, leading us beyond the brinks of our experience, flooding us with existential concerns and threats. To 2040 further cements the might of Jorie Graham's poetic work and her immense, oracular vision, which is as astonishing as it is necessary.' Neha Mulay, The Adroit Journal 'Graham is adept at this kind of philosophical, or, indeed neo-scientific, display... The result is blistering and overwhelming, a clear depiction of our extreme, accelerating existence.' Kate Simpson, The Poetry Review 'The poems are invigorating in their formal inventiveness and precise use of language. The surprising lineation, extension of white space, erosion of words (you/u) and accretion of phrases have the effect of tuning us into Grahamâs mind; we follow her thoughts as she wrestles with our wilful destruction of the earth, shot through with images of hope.' Jo Dixon, Everybody's Reviewing 'The American writer's visionary 15th collection is one of her best books yet. These luminous poems consider the importance of attending to the wisdom nature offers us... A profound engagement with how our thinking about nature might change, and transform us in the process.' Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian 'Of the many questions put throughout Jorie Graham's stunning new collection, To 2040, the first is the most urgent: "Are we / extinct yet."...The common shape of poems here is a precisely unbalanced four-line stanza: seldom do lines and phrases match, sentences spill across lines. It is the flow of intellect, the mind at work.' Stephen Sexton, Irish Times 'In her new book, Graham's poems continue to exhort us to be present, and she has found a startlingly intimate way of situating an individual consciousness among its precarious cohabitants.' Walt Hunter, The Atlantic 'What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualising the future.... Every poem is an attempt at orientation - sometimes within a disorienting void. However considered Graham's revisions, the sense is of being in the moment with her - intimacy the closest thing to consolation.' Kate Kellaway, The Observer 'Attempting to comment briefly on this visionary commotion is like trying to capture thunder and lightning in a bottle... This is a world beyond humanity, beyond nature, beyond culture, and yet amid the ruins there is the undeniable triumph and power of poetic utterance' Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement 'From its opening page until its final lines, Graham''s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer's debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow their banks...Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on...' Jeff Gordinier, New York Times 'Sweeping lines and fractured phrases, ampersands and italics, lines unexpectedly justified right: all of these wake us up to 'the freshness of what's / there.' Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'Her most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go. . . . She in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you sense what it is you're letting go of, now, before it's gone.' *Harper's Magazine* 'Runaway, Jorie Graham's expansive new book, insistently tunes us to the human urgency for wholeness, for the meanings of embodiment in a time when some of us/are murdered, and some of have mouths that keep saying yes.' Forrest Gander, New York Times 'Even when these poems are at their darkest and most purposefully incoherent in terms of voice and tone, there remains a trace of language's ability to seek out, transmit and make visible the impact of the world on the self for others to experience.' Oxonian Review 'The reason that poets are addicted to poetry and they write it for a lifetime, is because a poem will permit you to go through life and have an experience you can't have by any other means.' Jorie Graham talking to Ian McMillan on Radio 3's The Verb, 15 December 2017 'Another striking book from Jorie Graham, and one that frequently reaches fever-pitch in its frantic explosion of the lyric mode. Graham's themes in these poems -ranging through sickness, death and environmental crises -would rattle any reader, and her long lines, clamouring fragments and sprawling chorus of voices increase this effect to a dramatic extent. These are urgent, stressed and stressful poems that produce a panicked motion-sickness as you spiral through them. This is an important, desperate and, at times, frightening, book that truly captures the tone of contemporary times.' The Poetry School Books of the Year 2017 'In FAST, [Graham's] subject is mortality - her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), her parents', that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), that of the planet. It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that, by the end, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the right-hand side of the page. And through it all, an unwavering, serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden's assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.' The Guardian 'Fast might immerse us in monstrous acts of environmental and political violence, our obsession with progress, money, and our own individualistic, virtual worlds, but what still succeeds is the wish to live on. Perhaps if we were to listen to that wish we might, amongst all the acceleration, stop and think again.' - The London Magazine 'We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight. If we can't see, with Graham, "the spots where the birds must eventually land", at least we know now where we should be looking.' Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement. 'The poems in Jorie Graham's Sea Change might look unapproachable but they are models of clarity and purity.' *Nicola Smyth, 'Books of the Year', the Independent, 28 December 2008* 'There are erotic poems, elegiac poems, and there are dauntingly difficult, allusive and even impenetrable poems. Throughout there is a powerful, engaging intelligence and an affirming lyric grace.' *Stephen Matterson on The Errancy, in Poetry Ireland Review, vol. 62*	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: John Gallas read more Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
Privacy Statement Sitemap RSS Feeds Home Events Authors Titles Imprints Information Resources This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd