Swarm - Couverture souple

Graham, Jorie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1857544951 ISBN 13 : 9781857544954

Editeur : Carcanet Press Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

"Swarm", Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros and law. The poet confronts a fundamental problem: whom to address, who there still is to address. She negotiates passionately with those powers that human beings feel themselves subject to: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love. To swarm is to leave a hive, a home, a stable sense of one's body, a hierarchy of values, in an attempt, apart, to found new forms that will hold. Key players in Graham's drama are the first person, the enjambment, the phrase, the gap, the sentence. And everywhere lovers seek the borders they must break as well as those they must at all costs hold. Clyemnestra awaits Agamemnon, Calypso veils Ulysses, Daphne accepts Apollo: figures familiar from her earlier books reappear, eager to plead their stories into sense.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

With Swarm, her first new collection since The Errancy, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham has given us a book-length sequence of poems stunning in its sober encounter with destiny, eros, and law. The narrator, at times almost vertigo-ridden by the problem of who is addressed-whom there still is to address-negotiates passionately with those powers human beings feel themselves to be "underneath": God, matter, law, custom, the force of love.

To "swarm" is to leave an originating organism'a hive, a home country, a stable sense of one's body, a stable hierarchy of values -- in an attempt, by coming apart, to found a new form that will hold. The Roman Empire, its distillation in the Forum's remains, the Romantic imagination of that buried past ("underneath"), as well as the collapse of the erotic border between lovers' bodies, are persistent metaphors for the destabilization and reformation of the idea and sensation of personhood.

The "first" person and "enjambment" are characters in this book, as are the fragment, the gap, the sentence. And everywhere lovers seek to find the borders that must break as well as those that must at all cost hold. Clytemnestra await-ing Agamemnon, Calypso veiling Ulysses, Daphne accepting Apollo -- a variety of mythological characters reappear here, ea-ger to plead their stories into sense, desper-ate for some insight into the buried justice of natural law.

Biographie de l'auteur

Jorie Graham is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, the Forward Prize and the International Nonino Prize, Graham's work is widely translated.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1857544951
• ISBN 13: 9781857544954
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 128
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible