About the Author

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 an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including To 2040 (2023), [To] the Last [Be] Human (2021), Runaway (2018) and FAST (2017) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her collection PLACE (2012) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other Carcanet collections include Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: 'For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption — intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems.' Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. In 2017 she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.


Author photo credit © Dino Ignani, 2026.

Reviews

'the many promises of vision'
The Taken-Down God: Selected Poems 1997-2008, Jorie Graham
(196pp, £14.95, Carcanet)
In 1997 the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field drew together poems from Jorie Graham's first five collections; subsequently, The Taken-Down God selects from the next five collections: The Errancy; Swarm; Never; Overlord and Sea Change. This new volume complements the first selected poems for it is possible to see Graham approaching, again, the colossal themes of the divine and the material, art and life, but The Taken-Down God also stands independently. Indeed, it is a compelling selection, made by Graham herself, that details the personal and the global concerns that have informed Graham's work in the last decade and a half.
In the past, Graham has described how ninety percent of her time is spent revising the poems she writes; attending to the music and metre of each line. It is no surprise then, that the poems in The Taken-Down God have been chosen and arranged with similar care. The selection feels orchestrated in the sense that the tone and subject matter of each poem echo one another not only between the poems themselves but also between the different collections. This will surely challenge the criticism that readers have often made over the fragmentary nature of Graham's writing.
For example, 'the glance' is introduced as a preoccupation of Graham's in the 1997 collection, The Errancy. In a poem such as 'Thinking' Graham describes a crow and 'my steady glance on him, cindering at the glance-core where / it held him tightest, swelled and sucked'. Here, Graham displays an anxiety regarding how the eye perceives the natural world. Placing 'Thinking' before 'That Greater Than Which is Nothing' highlights 'the many promises of vision' that the latter poem describes. Furthermore, it initiates an exploration of these 'promises' in poems such as 'Woods' and 'Gulls' collected in 2002's Never.
With The Taken-Down God it becomes tempting to suggest points at which Graham expresses particular ideas that direct her later writing; the poems selected from Never seem to indicate such a transition. Importantly, The Taken-Down God has included 'Evolution' with its endnote concerning 'the rate of extinction [that] is estimated at one every nine minutes.' Having explained how this time span 'inhabits' as well as 'structures' Never, it is appropriate that the poems that are included in this selected work concern temporality and environments. By parodying the writer's attempt to achieve a 'finished' representation of the natural world, 'Woods' provides a refreshing ecopoetic stance:
- oh swagger of dwelling in place, in voice -
surely one of us understands the importance.
Understands? Shall I wave a 'finished' copy at you
whispering do you wish to come for lunch.
Nor do I want to dwell on this.
I cannot, actually, dwell on this.
There is no home. One can stand out here
and gesture wildly, yes. One can say 'finished'
and look into the woods, as I do now, here,
but also casting my eye out
to see (although that was yesterday) (in through the alleyways
of trees) the slantings of morninglight [...]
'Gulls' dives ever more deeply into this subject matter and illustrates the 'en plein air' technique that Graham used to write Never. Engaged with 'porting' the natural world rather than reporting it, as Graham described in an interview, the poem becomes obsessively present-tense when considering the birds,
[...] the whole flock rising and running just
as the last film of darkness rises
leaving behind, also rising and falling in
tiny upliftings [...]
As the poem continues it becomes clear that the observer cannot keep up with the observation. As the scene changes with the movement of the sea, the light and the gulls, 'the words' are described 'leaping too, over their own / staying':
So then it's sun in surf-breaking water: incircling, smearing: mind not
knowing if it's still 'wave,' breaking on
itself, small glider, of it it's 'amidst'(red turning feathery)
or rather 'over' (the laciness of foambreak) or just what [...] it is.
The Taken-Down God continues to explore these environmental concerns with poems from the collection that follows; Overlord. Indeed, these environmental concerns have led Graham to approach her early themes regarding the divine and material worlds from a different perspective. 'Please don't let us destroy / Your world. No the world', Graham implores in 'Praying (Attempt of May 9 '03)', and later, in another poem, Graham realises the harmful consequences of'the disappearance of hope' and so declares 'A new illusion must present / itself immediately'. In the light of this it is even more apparent that what is missing in the book is the poem that lends its name to the selected work. It seems like a strange omission as the poem, 'The Taken-Down God', that was originally included in Never would seem central to many of Graham's wonderfully articulated anxieties regarding belief, sight, writing and language.
Yet this is a small problem in view of a selected poems that will appeal to both a reader who is familiar with Graham and who wishes to explore the links between her collections, and a reader who may wish to gain a first impression of Graham's work. As the book concludes with a selection from Sea Change, Graham begins to enact the declaration made earlier, that of 'A new illusion'. In 'Embodies' Graham asks 'what am I to do with my imagination' and later answers (in poems such as 'Root End') that the imagination must envision the future. This attempt to find a way of dealing with environmental change continues to be explored in Graham's most recent Place (2012): a collection that readers will surely turn to after The Taken-Down God in wanting to see the direction in which Graham's work progresses at this uncertain time.

Jorie Graham is an allusive and complex poet. The Taken Down God deals with large themes: political, environmental, philosophical. The poems coax the reader into their labyrinthine embrace. In 'The Guarding Angel of the Little Utopia' the angel poses questions which take us from the concrete to the abstract: 'Shall I arrange these few remaining flowers? / Shall I rearrange these gossamer efficiencies?' Such shifts are characteristic of her work. In 'Prayer' the speaker leans over a railing to 'watch the minnows, thousands, swirl / themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the / way to create current'. Here Graham reflects on the nature of instinct and agency and what it means to be human.

Jorie Graham is an American poet with a wide experience of the world. Her early life alone warrants a biopic. Born in 1950 to a sculptor and a journalist, she was raised in Italy and France. In 1986, she was involved in the student protests in Paris, and went on to study film-making in New York. She then married into the Graham family, publishers of the Washington Post, at the time of the Watergate scandal.
After that, it might be said, her career became more conventional, though no less glamorous. Moving to Iowa, she began teach on America's most prestigious creative-writing programme, and later succeeded Seamus Heaney to a professorship at Harvard.
Graham's celebrity was confirmed when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for The Dream of the United Field, a selection from her first five books. The Taken-Down God selects from her next five, which appeared over the following decade. As such, it serves as a companion volume to her latest collection PLACE, which won the Forward Prize in the UK last year.
Long admired in America for her ambitious interweaving of philosophical and scientific ideas, Graham is also a poet who insists on the importance of first-hand observation of the world. Drafted in artist's sketchpads, her capacious verse attempts to shape and press a sense of the complexity of things upon the reader.
Graham's signature style is one of long, indented lines and dash-ridden sentences. Challenging the eye to follow its jagged paragraphs, this is verse that tries to attend to every second of perception.
One of her signature subjects is birds. Here is a crow launching into flight, captured in phrase-by-phrase detail, as it might have been seen by Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'wing-thrash where he falls at first against the powerline, / then updraft seized, gravity winnowed, the falling raggedly / reversed'.
And here is a grotesque 'mess of geese', which might have frightened Sylvia Plath: 'Groping their armless way, their underneaths greening. / A slow roiling. As of redundancy. Squirming as they sponge / over the short wet grass - bunchy.'
Anything that moves in a Jorie Graham poem is a potential metaphor for a thought process. Thus, the geese are also a 'mess / of conflicting notions' and the poem about the crow is simply titled Thinking.
The problem with always thinking about thinking in poetry is that self-consciousness can be an uncritical muse. Graham's voluble monologues buttonhole us into hearing them out. But the rhetorical questions and quizzical digressions of the lecturer do not always make for compelling verse ('space and time can be subdivided / infinitely many times. But isn't this sad? / By now hasn't a sadness crept in?').
The poems included in The Taken-Down God are at their best when they have a scene squarely before them. In Never (2002), the poet repeatedly walks along the beach, sketching the whole commotion of birds, water and light.
Watching a flock of gulls standing along the shoreline, she notes how they will suddenly run away from a wave, 'leaving behind... / almost a mile of white underfeathers, up-turned, white spines / gliding over the wet / sand, being blown down towards / the unified inrolling awayness of white'.
Running in and out like waves themselves, Graham's free, irregular lines let rip in such descriptions. She is not a carefree poet, though. Anxiety is the dominant emotion of many poems, as they confront the disorder of a world they cannot control.
In her most recent collections, she has begun to write about the threat of climate change. Sea Change (2008) features her longest line yet as she restlessly traces connections between the individual life and the global ecosystem. 'Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms', begins the poem 'Embodies'. It is a worrying instance of seasonal disturbance. But the sentence does not stop for one-and-a-half pages, eventually arriving at the dark thought that humanity has always had an irrational belief in its ability to 'stave off / the future'.
These poems are arresting in their determination to see beyond the comforts of civilisation. The clouds in the sky do not care about us. 'Look out for them', we are warned, 'their armada is not aware of your air-conditioned / office'.
Graham does not offer poetry as a way of transcending environmental crisis. Instead, she uses her searching, associative sentences to think along the fragile chain of being: from the in-/dispensable plankton of the North Atlantic to the 'useless hands' of the writing poet.

Jorie Graham’s ambitious, densely tangled work rewards the effort.
The Taken-Down God is Jorie Graham’s second volume of selected poems, following The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), and includes work from five collections, beginning with The Errancy (1997) and ending with Sea Change (2008). Its judicious selection from these books provides a comprehensive introduction to Graham’s development over the past fifteen years, and in some ways represents a useful way in which to encounter a poet whose work can be uneven – a characteristic that is perhaps inseparable from her salutary desire for continual change. The poems included here testify to a remarkable willingness to experiment with new forms of expression, as suggested by works as varied as the hesitant, Dickinsonian fragmentation of Swarm (2000), which describes ‘the path of thought also now too bright / so that its edges cut’, and the fluent, expansive Sea Change in which Graham introduced her now typical formal arrangement of long lines protruding from a central column of shorter ones, the transitions between which are enacted by enjambment so abrupt it often divides words in two: ‘you are in- / terrupted again and again . . .’. What provides continuity across this period is Graham’s exploratory sensibility; for her, the ‘activity of awakening’ is always more important than the end result. Though her poems are capable of accommodating sizeable concerns (‘the /end of the world’, ‘the politics of time’, for example), much of her most intensely engaging thought occurs when it moves outwards from small, precisely defined subjects. Particularly fruitful are the moments when she applies her attention to language, which she has a remarkable ability to objectify and animate. ‘Other’, the opening poem of Overlord (2005), employs a brief childhood recollection to interrogate the fertile vagueness of the innocuous phrase ‘now now’:
Now now, the adults used to saymeaning pay attention, meaning the thing athand, the crucial thing, has theseslippery sides: this now its one slope, this now itsother. The thing itself, the essential thing, is inbetween. Don’t blink. Don’tmiss it. Pay attention. It’s a bullet.
Like Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infrathin’, which stipulates that the attention of the artist should be focused not on metaphorical points of identification between names, objects, moments in time and so on, but rather on the most minute intervals between them (number twelve of his famous list of examples asks us to recognize as distinct the moment between ‘the detonation noise of a gun / (very close) and the apparition of the bullet / hole in the target’), Graham repeatedly challenges herself to realize an impossible precision in attention and expression, while remaining fully aware of its impossibility. The inability of language to seize ‘the essential thing’ is addressed in poem after poem, balanced by a consciousness that, as she has put it in an interview, ‘what leaks in between the attempts at seizure is the thing, and you have to be willing to suffer the limits of description in order to get it’. Despite her awareness that it cannot be figured directly, the desire somehow to present this unpresentable thing persists: ‘In / Silence’ describes the desire to ‘catch in its syntax the necessary sacrifice’ of expression, which is ‘the betrayal (into the clear morning air) / of the source of happiness into mere (sung) happiness’. Given the predominance of this concern with the relationship between description and its subject, it is particularly apt that the title of this Selected Poems should connote both transcription and removal.
Graham’s commitment to ‘the one truth, precision’ is, in some instances, explicitly political in its motivation. Following, at least in part, Ezra Pound’s dictum that ‘a people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing a grip on its empire and on itself’, her poems continually resist the detachment of words from their meanings to suit the purposes of those whose intention is to distort or misrepresent. Repeatedly throughout The Taken-Down God she scrutinizes words that, particularly in political discourse, have often been drained of identifiable sense to the point that they seem unabashedly to advertise their ‘shiny / emptiness’. This tendency is continued in P L A C E, Graham’s most recent collection. ‘Dialogue (of the Imagination’s Fear)’ states that ‘it is a / wonder we / can use the word free and have it mean anything at all / to us’. Graham’s extreme, strenuous alertness to natural phenomena can also be seen as a further oblique form of redress against the wilful obfuscations of public speech. ‘Although’ contains a typically scrupulous description:
The vase of cut flowers with which the real is(before us on the page)permeated – is it a page – look hard – (I try) –this bouquetin itsvase – tiger dahlias (red and white), orangefreesia (three stalks) (floatingout), onelarge blue-mauve hydrangea-head, stillwet (thisbending falling heavy withload) (and yellowrose)
Names, numbers, colours, parentheses and qualifications extend out from one another in a calligrammatic fashion, until the strenuous evocation of the desire for precision overrides any imaginative realization of it: ‘the necessary sacrifice’ referred to above. Elsewhere, we get another exact(ing) description of a flower, which reveals another impetus to attentiveness in its challenge to the reader:
look, youwho might not believe this becauseyou are not seeing it with your owneyes: look:this lightis movingacross that flower onmy sillat this exactspeed – right now – right here – now it’s goneyet go back upfive lines it isstill there I can’tgo back, it’s gonebut you –
Here Graham’s appeal to our faith in the reality of the scene she is describing becomes analogous to our faith in the texts that inform us of the reality of – to take two recurring themes of hers – environmental destruction and distant historical events. By the time we have surmounted our hesitations,‘it is / still there I can’t / go back, it’s gone’.
‘Although’ illustrates a common criticism of Graham’s work, which is that she often obscures that which she describes by obtruding herself, or her contextual thinking, too forcefully into the scene; the reader cannot ‘see’ because Graham is too preoccupied with describing her experience of seeing, an excessive mediation: ‘visibility blocking the view’, as she puts it in ‘Evolution’, from Sea Change (2008). Like one of her great inspirations, Elizabeth Bishop, Graham’s most virtuosic descriptions demonstrate that she is having to exert herself very strenuously in order to see what she is describing, but rather than having the point of attention obscured by some other element of the exterior world (as, say, mist and fog recur in Bishop’s work), for Graham it is the mechanics of her own thought, her hunger for connection and extrapolation, as well as the incessant infidelities of her language, that obtrude and obscure, that she has to strip back and fight through in order to reach a never fully achieved point of clarity or perception. These internal obstacles are sometimes dramatized, as in ‘Praying (Attempt of April 19, ’04)’, from Overlord (2005), which extends Graham’s long-standing interest in the relationship between the physical structure of the eye and that which it perceives: ‘Has the human eye changed. The eye doctor asks me / if it was more like dust or soil,the matter my eye splays / against the empty walls. More like dust. Then it’s ok. / It’s really my own blood I see. / It will disintegrate, just not right away’. It is when attempting to parse, with great difficulty, what is actually perceived and what is a hallucination of the sense or the imagination, that Graham’s idiosyncratically knotty thought seems most at home with its subject.
At times, the manner in which Graham situates her perceptions in an abruptly and sometimes unaccountably broad historical context can seem portentous, as in ‘Untitled’, which describes a neighbourhood dog killed by a passing car: ‘my century, the / one where 187 million perished in wars, /massacre, persecution, / famine – all policy-induced / is the one out of which/ I must find the reason / for the young still-loved creature being carried now onto the family lawn’. However, Graham is fully aware of the risk involved in such a manoeuvre, and in the wonderful ‘The Bird on My Railing’ supplies an elusive rationale for the shocking collision of personal and historical experience often encountered in her work: ‘our personal / dead cast always deeper into / the general dead / no matter how hard you try / to keep your /own your / known own’. The peculiar, syntactically jumbled phrase, ‘to keep your / own your / known own’, contaminated by resonances of Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous remarks on ‘known unknowns’, expresses Graham’s sense of the often fractious interconnectedness of not only the personal, the political and the historical, but also the known and the unknown, the real and the imagined, the thought and the felt. ‘I was a hard thing to undo’, she writes, channelling Hopkins, in ‘Le Manteau de Pascal’, and it is with this declaration in mind that Jorie Graham’s ambitious, densely tangled work should be approached. It rewards the effort.

The Taken-Down-God is Jorie Graham's second volume of selected poems, following The Dream of the Unified Field (1995). and includes work from five collections, beginning with The Errancy (1997) and ending with Sea Change (2008). Its judicious selection from these books provides a comprehensive introduction to Graham's development over the past fifteen years, and in some ways represents a useful way in which to encounter a poet whose work can be uneven- a characteristic that is perhaps inseperable from her salutary desire for continual change. The poems included here testify to a remarkable willingness to experiment with new forms of expressionm, as suggested by works as varied as the hesitant, Dickinsonian fragmentation of Swarm (2000), which describes 'the path of thought also now too bright / so that its edges cut', and the fluent, expansive Sea Change in which Graham introduced her now typical formal arrangement of long lines protruding from a central column of shorter ones, the transitions between which are enacted by enjambment so abrupt it often divides words in town: 'you are in- /terrupted again and again...'. What provides continuity across this period is Graham's exploratory sensibility; for her, the 'activity of awakening' is always more important than the end result.
Though her poems are capable of accommodating sizeable concerns ('the / end of the world', 'the politics of time', for example), much of her most intensely engaging thought occurs when it moves outwards from small, precisely defined subjects. Particularly fruitful are the moments when she applies her attention to language, which she has a remarkable ability to objectify and animate. 'Other', the opening poem of Overlord (2005), employs a brief childhood recollection to interrogate the fertile vagueness of the innocuous phrase 'now now':
Now now, the adults used to say
meaning pay attention, meaning the thing at
hand, the crucial thing has these
slippery sides: this now its one slope, this now its
other. The thing itself, the essential thing, is in
between. Don't blink. Don't
miss it. Pay attention. It's a bullet.
Like Marcel Duchamp's concept of the 'infrathin', which stipulates that the attention of the artist should be focused not on metaphorical points of identification between names, objects, moments in time and so on, but rather on the most minute intervals between them (number twelve of his famous list of examples asks us to recpgnize as distinct the moment between 'the detonation noise of a gun / (very close) and the apparition of the bullet / hole in the target'). Graham repeatedly challenges herself to realize an impossible precision in attention and expression, while remaining fully aware of its impossibility. The inability of language to seize 'the essential thing' is addressed in poem after poem, balanced by a consciousness that, as she has put it in an interview, 'what leaks in between the attempts at seizure is the thing, and you have to be willing to suffer the limits of description in order to get it'. Despite her awareness that it cannot be figured directly, the desire somehow to present this unpresentable thing persists. 'In / Silence' describes the desire to 'catch in its syntax the necessary sacrifice' of expression, which is 'the betrayal (into the clear morning air) / of the source of happiness into mere (sung) happiness'. Given the predominance of this concern with the relationship between description and its subject, it is particuarly apt that the title of this Selected poems should connote both transcription and removal.
Graham's commitment to 'the one truth, precision' is, in some instances, explicitly political in its motivation. Following, at least in part, Ezra Pound's dictum that 'a people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing a grip on its empire and on itself', her poems continually resist the detachment of words from their meanings to suit the purposes of those whose itnention is to distort or misrepresent. Repeatedly throughout The Taken-Down God she scrutinizes words that, particularly in political discourse, have often been drained of identifiable sense to the point that they seem unabashedly to advertise their 'shiny / emptiness'. This tendency is continued in P L A C E, Graham's most recent collection. 'Dialogue (of the Imagination's Fear)' states that 'it is a / wonder we / can use the word free and have it mean anything at all / to us'. Graham's extreme, strenuous alertness to natural phenomena can also be seen as a further oblique form of redress against the wilful obfuscations of public speech. 'Although' contains a typically scrupulous description:
The vase of cut flowers with which the real is
(before us on this page)
permeated - is it a page - look hard - (I try) -
this bouquet
in its
vase - tiger dahlias (red and white), orange
freesia (three stalks) (floating
out), one
large blue-mauve hydrangea-head, still
wet (this
bending falling heavy with
load) (and yellow)
rose)
Names, numbers, colours, parantheses and qualifications extend out from one another in a calligrammatic fashion, until the strenuous evocation of the desire for precision overrides any imaginative realization of it: 'the necessary sacrifice' referred to above. Elsewhere, we get another exact(ing) description of a flower, which reveals another impetus to attentiveness in its challenge to the reader:
look, you
who might not believe this because
you are not seeing it with your own
eyes: look:
this light
is moving
across that flower on
my sill
at this exact
speed - right now - right here - now it is gone
yet go back up
five lines it is
still there I can't
go back, it's gone
but you -
Here Graham's appeal to our faith in the reality of the scene she is describing becomes analogous to our faith in the texts that inform us of the reality of - to take two recurring themes of hers - environmental destruction and distant historical events. By the time we have surmounted our hesitations, 'it is / still there I can't / go back, it's gone'.
'Although' illustrates a common criticism of Graham's work, which is that she often obscures that which she describes by obtruding herself, or her contextual thinking, too forcefully into the scene; the reader cannot 'see' because Graham is too preoccupied with describing her experience of seeing, an excessive meditation: 'visibility blocking the view', as she puts it in 'Evolution', from Sea Change (2008). Like one of her great inspirations, Elizabeth Bishop, Graham's most virtuosic descriptions demonstrate that she is having to exert herself very strenuously in order to see what she is describing, but rather than having the point of attention obscured by some other element of the exterior world (as, say, mist and fog recur in Bishop's work), for Graham it is the mechanics of her own thought, her hunger for connection dn extrapolation, as well as the incessant infidelities of her language, that obtrude and obscure, that she has to strip back and fight through in order to reach a never fully achieved point of clarity or perception. These internal obstacles are sometimes dramatized, as in 'Praying (Attempt of April 19, '04)', from Overlord (2005), which extends Graham's long-standing interest in the relationship between the physical structure of the eye and that which is perceives: 'Has the human eye changed. The eye doctor asks me / if it was more like dust or soil, the matter my eye splays / against the empty walls. More like dust. Then it's ok. / It;s really my own blood I see. / It wil disintegrate, just not right away'. It is when attempting to parse, with great difficulty, what is actually perceived and what is a hallucination of the senses or the imagination, that graham's idiosyncratically knotty thought seems most at home with its subject.
At times, the manner in which graham situates her perceptions in an abruptly and sometimes unaccountable broad historical context can seem portentous, as in 'Untitled', which describes a neighbourhood dog killed by a passing car: 'my century, the / one where 187 million perished in wars, / massacre, persecution, / famine- all policy-induced / is the one out of which / I must find the reason / for the young still-loved creature being carried now onto the family lawn'. However, Graham is fully aware of the risk involved in such a manoeuvre, and in the wonderful 'The Bird on My Railing' supplies an elusive rationale for the shocking collision of personal and historical experience often encountered in her work: 'our personal / dead cast always deeper into / the general dead / no matter how hard you try / to keep your / own your / known own'. The peculiar, syntactically jumbled phrase, 'to keep your / own your / known own', contaminated by resonances of Donald Rumsfeld's infamous remarks on 'known unknowns', expresses Graham's sense of the often fractious interconnectedness of not only the personal, the political and the historical, but also of the known and the unknown, the real and the imagined, the thought and the felt. 'I was a hard thing to undo', she writes, channelling Hopkins, in 'Le Manteay de Pascal', and it is with this declaration in mind that Jorie Graham's ambitious, densely tangled work should be approached. It rewards the effort.