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From Erosion :
SAN SEPOLCRO
Jorie Graham
?
. . . . 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 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.
SAN SEPOLCRO
Jorie Graham
?
. . . . 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 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.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
About the author
Jorie Graham
60 books182 followersJorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 12, 2013
Going back to this book again after twenty year of so, I find it less powerful than I'd remembered it--the poems ask abstractions to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting. That's the overall sense this reading gave me--but there are many great oblique lines that I find I want to carry on with me. And I'll always be fond of it for having been there when I was first trying to figure out what poetry could be.
Some favored bits:
...a space through which
you could fall,
an echo travel,
and meaning
--small, jeweled, deep-water--
flash.
“In What Manner the Body is United With the Soule”
-
...Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a looose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption.
“To a Friend Going Blind”
Some favored bits:
...a space through which
you could fall,
an echo travel,
and meaning
--small, jeweled, deep-water--
flash.
“In What Manner the Body is United With the Soule”
-
...Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a looose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption.
“To a Friend Going Blind”
February 1, 2009
This is one of the best poetry books that I've ever read. Graham is an absolute genius.
March 22, 2020
I am the fish that ate the fish that ate the littlest,
in thought,
in afterthought;
swimming the one world deaf, waving, goodbye for motor,
fish that can't hear
itself swim, its hum
in the water;
in thought,
in afterthought;
swimming the one world deaf, waving, goodbye for motor,
fish that can't hear
itself swim, its hum
in the water;
June 11, 2007
Certainly a minor masterpiece. Easy to read, unforgettably accurate--a great starter (and ender) to what poetry is capable of in the hands of a lucid, passionate world-watcher.
June 16, 2008
An amazing book of poetry by one of America’s best poets. This is some of the toughest poetry I’ve ever read – tough to understand, tough to describe, tough to dissect. At the same time Graham writes in theoretical abstractions, she also writes with specific and vibrant images that can overtake you as you try to make your way through her poems. It’s the kind of poetry that frustrates you when you can’t understand it, but gives you a huge feeling of release and joy when you finally figure it out. This is definitely not poetry for everyone, but it’s damn good poetry.
Read
October 11, 2025“we are defined by what we will not take / into ourselves….”
definitely in the running to be one of my favorite collections ever
definitely in the running to be one of my favorite collections ever
August 3, 2008
Jorie's poetry is much more sensual than I initially gave it credit for being, yet she simultaneously possesses the strongest intellectual backbone of almost any living poet, certainly any living American woman poet. The poem "Salmon" in this collection is a modern masterpiece.
March 20, 2015
A slim volume of poetry (is that redundant?) that I read through and wondered about and look forward to understanding more and more.
Read
October 17, 2022her second !! incredible work and I think an odd division here for me the earlier poems in the collection sound a firmer symbol-image there's a picture to each of them but the later ones in here are where I really live that's the strength of it. Anyway after more of her .
EROSION
I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.
We are, ourselves, a mannerism now,
having fallen
out of the chain
of evolution,
So we grow fat with unqualified life.
Today, on this beach
I am history to these fine
pebbles. I run them
through my fingers. Each time
some molecules rub off
evolving into
the invisible. Always
I am trying to feel
the erosion-_my grandfather, stiffening
on his bed, learning
to float on time, his mind like bait presented
to the stream ongoing, or you, by my side,
sleep rinsing you always a little less
clean, or daily
the erosion
of the right word, what it shuts,
or the plants coming forth as planned out my window, row
after row, sealed
into here....
EROSION
I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.
We are, ourselves, a mannerism now,
having fallen
out of the chain
of evolution,
So we grow fat with unqualified life.
Today, on this beach
I am history to these fine
pebbles. I run them
through my fingers. Each time
some molecules rub off
evolving into
the invisible. Always
I am trying to feel
the erosion-_my grandfather, stiffening
on his bed, learning
to float on time, his mind like bait presented
to the stream ongoing, or you, by my side,
sleep rinsing you always a little less
clean, or daily
the erosion
of the right word, what it shuts,
or the plants coming forth as planned out my window, row
after row, sealed
into here....
January 3, 2023
I had a much stronger emotional response to this book than to Graham's later collection "Place," which I came across in undergrad. I remember thinking that book was opaque and that Graham was writing at a remove. These poems, on the other hand, are intense and intensely clear, and Graham is nearby, turning over these murmurings of ancient history, art, and ecology in her palm and in her line. She was just profiled days ago in the New Yorker, where she is paraphrased describing "line breaks as cliffs that the reader tumbles down, over and over." And well....yeah.
Read
July 18, 2026Brilliant writing about light
October 1, 2014
I remember liking this collection more when I first read it five years ago. That is not to say that I do not still really like many of the poems in this collection. It's just that I find the collection uneven. Many of the poems veer deeply abstract, and that is not where I am in my life. I enjoy where Graham's lines and images align, enriching the texture of a beautifully specific scene.
In "Wanting a Child," I feel the water when the poet writes, "How hard it is for the river here to re-enter/the sea, though it's most beautiful, of course, in the waste/of time where it's almost,/turned back. Then/it's yoked,/trussed. . . .The river/has been everywhere, imagine, dividing, discerning,/cutting deep into the parent rock,/scouring and scouring/its own bed." The images of human-manipulated waterways and fish created many of the strongest images for me. In "Reading Plato," it's the description of the man carefully creating his own fishing lures: "Bareheaded, in a soiled/shirt,/speechless, my friend/is making//lures, his hobby. Flies/so small/he works with tweezers and/a magnifying glass./They must be/so believable//they're true--feelers,/antennae,/quick and frantic/as something/drowning." Graham captures a similar scene in "Salmon" despite merely watching the salmon run on television: "I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,/in our motel room half-way through/Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past/the importance of beauty,/archaic,/not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper/into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,/and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river/and a blue river traveling/in opposite directions."
The best moments capture not just the image of nature, but the momentum and trajectory. They become the documentary as well as any Ansel Adams black-and-white. "Although it doesn't seem/anything's missing,/thousands of wasps/have eaten/intelligently/of these branches//and made, out of spittle/and pulp/a fine grey paper/they've bandaged/sheet after sheet/round and under and through//the branchings/until it's/a nest, a dark grey/freedom" [from "Wood Wasps in the Spanish Willow"].
In "Wanting a Child," I feel the water when the poet writes, "How hard it is for the river here to re-enter/the sea, though it's most beautiful, of course, in the waste/of time where it's almost,/turned back. Then/it's yoked,/trussed. . . .The river/has been everywhere, imagine, dividing, discerning,/cutting deep into the parent rock,/scouring and scouring/its own bed." The images of human-manipulated waterways and fish created many of the strongest images for me. In "Reading Plato," it's the description of the man carefully creating his own fishing lures: "Bareheaded, in a soiled/shirt,/speechless, my friend/is making//lures, his hobby. Flies/so small/he works with tweezers and/a magnifying glass./They must be/so believable//they're true--feelers,/antennae,/quick and frantic/as something/drowning." Graham captures a similar scene in "Salmon" despite merely watching the salmon run on television: "I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,/in our motel room half-way through/Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past/the importance of beauty,/archaic,/not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper/into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,/and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river/and a blue river traveling/in opposite directions."
The best moments capture not just the image of nature, but the momentum and trajectory. They become the documentary as well as any Ansel Adams black-and-white. "Although it doesn't seem/anything's missing,/thousands of wasps/have eaten/intelligently/of these branches//and made, out of spittle/and pulp/a fine grey paper/they've bandaged/sheet after sheet/round and under and through//the branchings/until it's/a nest, a dark grey/freedom" [from "Wood Wasps in the Spanish Willow"].
May 8, 2017
Jorie Graham has retaught me how to read poetry. I struggled a bit to get into this work, but found this lecture online helped a lot in understanding the way Graham perceives what the work of the poet is to be and how she herself reads poetry.
This book was extremely enjoyable. Attentive to all senses, I feel like this book can help one to experience life with some greater degree of intensity. It left me a little breathless sometimes.
I’m really enamoured by Graham’s use of stanza breaks and the way words end up on the page I find to be quite delightful. For example:
“Finally I heard
into music,
that is, heard past
the surface tension
which is pleasure, which holds
the self
afloat, miraculous
waterstrider
with no other home.
Not that I heard
very deep,
but heard there was a depth,”
It’s the type of poetry you can’t fully appreciate by merely hearing it read aloud. She can use stanza breaks to make you feel entire dimensions from surface to depth. She can use stanza breaks (in other cases) to make you feel like you are taking a leap or encountering an interruption -- similar things to that effect. I found her poetry incredibly cinematic even before I discovered she was once a film student at NYU. As the words tumble down the page in the opening poem, I could feel myself descending down a hill, and felt this zooming motion as I neared a town in the valley. It's hard to explain. But her poetry performs work on you. It transports you.
There’s also something obliquely religious or theological about her work as well. It’s immensely beautiful. Will likely return to some of her other work soon. Discovered Jorie Graham in an online lecture given by Francis Clooney and feel grateful I stumbled upon her poetry.
This book was extremely enjoyable. Attentive to all senses, I feel like this book can help one to experience life with some greater degree of intensity. It left me a little breathless sometimes.
I’m really enamoured by Graham’s use of stanza breaks and the way words end up on the page I find to be quite delightful. For example:
“Finally I heard
into music,
that is, heard past
the surface tension
which is pleasure, which holds
the self
afloat, miraculous
waterstrider
with no other home.
Not that I heard
very deep,
but heard there was a depth,”
It’s the type of poetry you can’t fully appreciate by merely hearing it read aloud. She can use stanza breaks to make you feel entire dimensions from surface to depth. She can use stanza breaks (in other cases) to make you feel like you are taking a leap or encountering an interruption -- similar things to that effect. I found her poetry incredibly cinematic even before I discovered she was once a film student at NYU. As the words tumble down the page in the opening poem, I could feel myself descending down a hill, and felt this zooming motion as I neared a town in the valley. It's hard to explain. But her poetry performs work on you. It transports you.
There’s also something obliquely religious or theological about her work as well. It’s immensely beautiful. Will likely return to some of her other work soon. Discovered Jorie Graham in an online lecture given by Francis Clooney and feel grateful I stumbled upon her poetry.
March 6, 2019
Has anyone figured this book out yet? There are moments where you see into that higher plane that Graham seemingly has access to, that gaze into the ineffable. Yes, these poems grow abstract and obscure. But Graham makes you understand just how unfamiliar the world is to us.
June 8, 2011
One of my favorite women poets.
February 20, 2012
There are some fantastic poems in this collection, but others that I just can't get into at all.
February 7, 2023
ON FORM FOR BERRYMAN (Jan 7, 1982)
1.
And what, to you, would it mean, this anniversary?
Backward and forward you flailed, but only horribly
forward you dragged. Were pulled
you hoped. Even if only by shape,
by law. So this, ten years, is your full rhyme
old man. It’s you now, blurred and breathless.
Anniversary, as in
you can’t get away
from the shape of the mess. Its beautiful bone.
The handshake you make with the invisible right at
the start. It keeps its word. And drives you under
trying to figure what word it was you gave,
what, then, do you owe?
That has to be the plan,
if nothing else: figure the debt, your own exceptional debt,
tossing and thrashing,
hoarding, forgiving and up all night waiting for something
to give. Waiting for the unstrangeness to find you
phrase by phrase, to climb
down through your knots lies chords, your miserable honeyed
beseeching, your skinny arms out
asking for proof,
2.
meaning you’ve got to be some kind of payment
due. In full. The guy down the hall from me
learning to play his trumpet doing scales
he’s got his job: pay back with accuracy, pay
with the one sharp note you learn and then
with the clean one
you don’t, the leap
into the crooked song. And the guy in the park
this morning early pushing his daughter in the swing,
he wants to be free,
he wants to owe something,
he pushes her in as if she were a better question
to ask of this light,
he pushes the words
flesh of my flesh which are impossible
up into the playlit playground. He wants to know
love which is mostly giving up
is for what? The swingset trembles from their work.
This is from him who knows you have to hate one thing
and hate it deep and well.
He pushes her up
into the sun which seems irrelevant, her hair
her beautiful fine useless hair, fruit of dumb growth,
up in the air now, for what, he wonders,
for what, this blaze of light that seems to mock him,
this brute afterlife, hair, this remnant
of history the sun
can know itself in.
<3
1.
And what, to you, would it mean, this anniversary?
Backward and forward you flailed, but only horribly
forward you dragged. Were pulled
you hoped. Even if only by shape,
by law. So this, ten years, is your full rhyme
old man. It’s you now, blurred and breathless.
Anniversary, as in
you can’t get away
from the shape of the mess. Its beautiful bone.
The handshake you make with the invisible right at
the start. It keeps its word. And drives you under
trying to figure what word it was you gave,
what, then, do you owe?
That has to be the plan,
if nothing else: figure the debt, your own exceptional debt,
tossing and thrashing,
hoarding, forgiving and up all night waiting for something
to give. Waiting for the unstrangeness to find you
phrase by phrase, to climb
down through your knots lies chords, your miserable honeyed
beseeching, your skinny arms out
asking for proof,
2.
meaning you’ve got to be some kind of payment
due. In full. The guy down the hall from me
learning to play his trumpet doing scales
he’s got his job: pay back with accuracy, pay
with the one sharp note you learn and then
with the clean one
you don’t, the leap
into the crooked song. And the guy in the park
this morning early pushing his daughter in the swing,
he wants to be free,
he wants to owe something,
he pushes her in as if she were a better question
to ask of this light,
he pushes the words
flesh of my flesh which are impossible
up into the playlit playground. He wants to know
love which is mostly giving up
is for what? The swingset trembles from their work.
This is from him who knows you have to hate one thing
and hate it deep and well.
He pushes her up
into the sun which seems irrelevant, her hair
her beautiful fine useless hair, fruit of dumb growth,
up in the air now, for what, he wonders,
for what, this blaze of light that seems to mock him,
this brute afterlife, hair, this remnant
of history the sun
can know itself in.
<3
October 7, 2026
There's milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. 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.
-- "San Sepolcro"
I am the fish that ate the fish that ate the littlest,
in thought,
in afterthought;
swimming the one world deaf, waving, goodbye for motor,
fish that can't hear
itself swim, its hum
in the water
-- "Mist"
I think the world
is a desperate
element. It would have us
calm it,
receive it. Therefore this
is what I
must ask you
to imagine: wind;
the moment
when the wind
drops; and grapes,
which are nothing,
which break
in your hands.
-- "Scirocco"
She looks like she could
outrun
anything, although of course
she's stuck
for good here in this
memory,
and in the myth it calls
to mind,
and in this late interpretation
stolen from
a half-remembered tree
which stands
there still like some god's
narrow throat
or mind nothing can slit her
free of.
-- "At the Long Island Jewish Geriatric Home"
What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
the air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time
where it is useless, merely
beautiful?
-- "Salmon"
March 3, 2021
For history
is the opposite
of the eye
for whom, for instance, six million
bodies in portions
of hundreds and
the flowerpots broken by a sudden
wind stand as
equivalent.
Graham's poetry is often strikingly beautiful, and possesses a philosophical elegance that is very appealing. The main thing that seems to be holding it back from its full potential is Graham's need to interiorise everything, rendering the poem's objects anaemic and blurry. "Updraft" is an insane poem though, really great.
May 4, 2021
There are pictures I found surprising at every turn but they always felt of the "thing" I want a poem to feel of... Some of these pictures I'll be mulling over for a long while to yet, and returning to more than once.
February 21, 2022
In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to.
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to.
October 6, 2022
3.5 stars
May 4, 2020
This is a book of poetry written by a woman. I liked four of the poems: water strider, deer fur, History, and snake.
Read
June 6, 2018“Who is/the nervous spirit/of this world/that must go over and over/what it already knows”
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews