Never: Poems

“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.”—New York Times Book Review

A vibrantly focused and intense collection of verse from Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field.

…I am free to go.

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Deftly meditating on nature, spirit, and imagination, Never showcases one of America’s most gifted and respected poets at the height of her creativity. These graceful, probing poems, distinguished by long, meticulously sculpted, almost muscular lines, are among the finest and most innovative compositions in the genre today.

Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."

With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

“[Never] declares that the artistic task of becoming, once begun, continues on.” - New York Times Book Review

“[Never] shows Graham to be a most formidable nature poet.” - Publishers Weekly

“[Never] shows Graham to be a most formidable nature poet, finding…perfect analogues for states of consciousness.” - PublishersWeekly

“Graham’s inventive, gracefully longitudinal, lush yet demanding meditations on the nature of being are exquisitely piquant and affecting.” - Booklist

“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.” - New York Times Book Review

“Graham is one of the most important living poets, and her control of her craft is undisputed.” - Library Journal

"Graham is one of those rare poets who not only has created a language and poetic structure all her own, but who seeks to redefine herself with each new book. Restless, unsatisfied, hungering for a further truth, she offers mediations in Never that are nothing less than dazzling." - San Diego Union-Tribune

"Her syntax fires like synapses. Take her labyrinthine poems the way Frost said to look at a star that fades when stared at. If we focus on a spot beside it, the light will swim into the eye and, as Graham words it, 'silver into place.'" - Seattle Weekly

"Sinuous beauty, and a wild, wide-ranging intellect—a sense of relentless inquiry hums beneath the surface of every line.... One of the most moving books of her career." - Vogue