No Image There and the Gaze Remains

To date, no book-length study of the work of poet Jorie Graham has been published. Graham now holds the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University; recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, Graham has established herself as one of the most important poets of her generation. This book addresses the connection between Graham's work and the legacy of American Modernism, arguing that her recurring interest in the visible world and how best to represent it in her poetry can be seen as a continuation of the work of Eliot and Stevens. For Graham, the visible world is a means of approaching the ineffable, or the divine. The poet's approach to the ineffable in her work is conflated at times with the relationship between the self and the other: maintaining the integrity of both and accurately representing the truth of what she sees become a moral project for the poet, aligning her work with that of the Moderns. The book addresses Graham's entire body of work, now nine books of poetry, and interprets her poetic preoccupation with visuality through the lens of psychoanalytic criticism.