Dream Of The Unified Field

Dream Of The Unified Field
by Jorie Graham

Dream Of The Unified Field
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jorie Graham
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-01-01
ISBN: 0880014768
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Ecco

Book Reviews of Dream Of The Unified Field

Book Review: The downhill slide of a once-great poet.
Summary: 2 Stars

Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems 1974-1994 (Ecco, 1995)

I love Jorie Graham's early work, the wunderkind poems of the seventies that established her as a real force in the world of poetry. Good, solid imagist stuff that tells its tale and gets out:

"...I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on

black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly."
("I Watched a Snake")

A book like this, on the other hand, that goes from the very beginnings of her career to the most recent stuff she'd done at the time shows the journey from that exciting young poet to someone who's gone so far off the rails that one's not terribly sure what to do with her stuff any more. First, the showing stopped and the telling started. Then the experiments (I assume they're experiments) in repetition began. Then came the leaving out of words, or the substitutions of "x" for various nouns. The end result is the long, rambling, boring pieces that make up the latter half of this book.

"Consisting of fountains, yes, but invisible, no?
And of what we spoke of in the dead of _________ once long ago.
And of long ago.
And of the fountains too, no?..."
("Untitled")

(note, as well, these are the only lines in the poem that rhyme.)

Instead of this, I'd suggest picking up the first two books material from this compilation is taken from (Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion), which are both wonderful. As for the rest... well, if the excerpt above didn't drive you nuts, go from there. **

Summary of Dream Of The Unified Field

The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.


This collection of Jorie Graham's poetry spans twenty years of writing with selections from her five previous volumes of poetry, including Erosion and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

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