Erosion
Jorie Graham

Paper | 1983 | $16.95 / £11.95 | ISBN: 9780691014050
96 pp.

eBook | ISBN: 9781400831425 | Where to buy this ebook

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EROSION
Jorie Graham

From "San Sepolcro":
. . . . How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No-one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line bodies
and wings to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California. She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.

Review:

"The attempt to find all the stops, to range through the gamut of possibility, makes Ms. Graham a poet of landscape and memory as well as a poet of art."--The New York Times Book Review

Another Princeton book authored or coauthored by Jorie Graham:

• Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts.

Series:

• Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets
  Paul Muldoon, Series Editor

Subject Area:

• Poetry

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $16.95 ISBN: 9780691014050

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £11.95 ISBN: 9780691014050

Prices subject to change without notice

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