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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN num: 9780060084721
ISBN number: 0060084723
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 128
Printing Date: March 01, 2003
Publishing house: Ecco
Release Date: March 04, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 465804
Studio: Ecco
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Amazon.com Review:
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. If you open and close your eyes
there should be a difference, no, in the way
the thing seen is--in its weight?--and then
what the thinking has begun to make ... because there is, on it, which we've
somehow
introduced, this wash which is duration....
('Philosopher's Stone')
Never is a brilliant example of the struggle to preserve the physical, both in mind and in art. While this notion applies to all artistic endeavors, Graham's poems argue implicitly for preservation since our means of documentation are faulty. --Michael Ferch
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Rated by buyers 
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This is unreadable. Go find someting else. Quickly. Notice how the people who review this book are directly polarized - they love it or hate it. If you love Graham's stuff, go for it, you won't be disappointed. But if you're not a Graham fan stay away. If you're looking to read her for the very first time, try Swarm, it's cleaner and more accessible.
Rated by buyers -
Her work is unreadable. It's too bad she abandoned what she had accomplished with Erosion so many years ago. She is good at convincing people of her importance and so no one will tell the truth about her work. If someone does, that person risks being thought of as a bad reader. But there is nothing to nourish the soul in her poems. Nothing to contemplate. They are not even interesting technically. The passionate defenses she generates always make me think of "protesting too much." Her work is like reading impenetrable critical essays. And even critical essays can be written for pleasurable reading, with ease and style. American poetry has gone down a wrong road by following her example.
Rated by buyers 
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In my judgment, Never could be one of Jorie Graham's most important books. It's amazing how she can write this way -- immediately accessible & still syntactically, linguistically, poetically, wholly innovative. Everything she writes by now is controversial, but never doubt her mastery. She revises her poems so many times people would be appalled, making sure that every bit of the music of her poems is exactly as she wants & that she has said & laid out everything she wants to say exactly. These poems are bursts of physical substance, love, passion, & barrages of insight. They move just like universes exploding out of universes. They don't whizz by in a blur, but catch all over. This is a collection of instances that adhere to true devotion, starting with a prayer.
I hope this review has been helpful to you.
Rated by buyers -
I can sing this poetry--Jorie Graham is the best at what she does.
Rated by buyers -
I have been trying to write something resembling a review of this book for a long time - during which time I have been living with and trying to absorb everything in NEVER, which is so much, and I still find it promising more even, than what I have from it already. The most immediate moment that presents itself in "Prayer" is the "here" of the now that is ghostly, yet audible somehow, still speakable, "posed," even on the lips. This "here" is just behind us as we read, and while it is lost in its instantiation as a moment of the most distinct pre-eminence, it is released in its passing into the visual current of the poem, and thus rendered palpable in different form. The persistence of this "spot of time" in light of what I would call its never-more-ness (and nevertheless still-being-ness) is what is at stake in the book, among many other things, among them, the difference between eternality (in part or whole, and as whom?) and immortality (in the sense of a Keatsian steadfastness of the bright star) and the idea of time as gravity, allowing for the possibility of being bound, itself the condition of freedom. The self does not save, and is not "saved" in its sameness, but in its being constantly sifted through time. And yet the "never" is subsequent to the "here" and felt as such, as existing in intimate relation to it, neither by design nor choice, and not without the pathos of mute distance between them. In other words, I could not disagree more with the view expressed by Sven Birkerts (in his comment on NEVER in the New York Times) that "the disappearance of the perceived thing or the felt experience into the inconclusive enactments of process points to a dead end in Graham's art." It is precisely the tension between the perceiver and the thing perceived, the "here" of experience and the undertow in which it is swallowed up and released in new form that Graham addresses, with seriousness and the grave beauty of patient attention. I should also add that being in her class was a great joy for me. She is a generous and brilliant teacher and the care with which she reads poems is a moral statement, as well as a pleasure to behold.
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