Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-94. Her other collections include The End of Beauty, P L A C E and RunawayTo 2040 came out in 2023.

Poem: ‘Lapse’

Jorie Graham, 22 March 2012

It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me – the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left – the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of symmetry, strap your twenty-two pounds of eyes, blood, hair, bone – so recently inside me – into the swing – and the sun still in the sky though it being so late as I look up to see...

Poem: ‘Employment’

Jorie Graham, 8 September 2011

Listen the voice is American it would reach you it has wiring in its swan’s neck                where it is                always turning round to see behind itself as it has no past to speak of except some nocturnal journals written in woods where...

Poem: ‘Torn Score’

Jorie Graham, 17 March 2011

I think this is all somewhere inside myself, the incessant burning of my birth             all shine             lessening as also all low-flame             heat of love: and places loved: space time and people heightening,...

All around in            houses near us, the            layoffs,            the windows shine back            sky, it is a            wonder we...

The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...

Read more reviews

Accidents of Priority

John Redmond, 22 August 1996

Famous poems, like faces, are a particularly memorable kind of introduction to the person they conceal. Like other kinds of introduction, they are often what we remember a person for, or what we...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences