Dream of the Unified Field

Jorie Graham's poetry insists that "the visible world" exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the subjective, the lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area "saturated with phenomena", in Helen Vendler's phrase, a place of shifting perspectives, abrupt changes, sometimes vertiginous in their reversals, but always moving towards possible celebration. This collection of poetry brings together in equilibrium science, philosophy and history. The "Selected Poems" draws on several earlier collections, "Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts" (1980), "Erosion" (1983), "The End of Beauty" (1987), "Region of Unlikeness" (1991) and "Materialism" (1993).