The End of Beauty

“One follows these poems as one follows music…. A mesmerizing American voice.” —Helen Vendler, The New Yorker 

The stunning third book of poems from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham

The End of Beauty is a remarkably striking, coherent collection that explores, in a language as precise and rich as any being written, the realm of belief and the methods by which we attempt to figure our world.

“Blake’s dialectics of mental flight, Whitman’s songs of the open road, Stevens’s ‘endlessly proliferating poem,’ Eliot’s Quartets, Ashbery’s prose poems have all taken some of the same chances. Graham keeps creative energy alive and unpredictable in these poems by sudden changes of focus; her psychic elations and hesitations are Romantic in their volatility but post-Romantic in their skepticism, their self-interruptions, their own stage directions.” —The New Yorker 

A collection of poems.

“Graham keeps creative energy alive and unpredictable in these poems…. One follows these poems as one follows music…. A mesmerizing American voice; one wants to hear its continuation.”  - New Yorker

"Like an abstract painter, Graham spreads the broad lines of her poems over a vast space: that metaphysical territory constituting the 'gorgeous/gap between the mind and the world.' It is a mythic dimension no pat labels, such as Classical or Christian, can adequately define, though the poet draws on Genesis, Ovid, and the lives of the saints to set her work in motion." - Library Journal