Taken-Down God

Jorie 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, including To 2040 (2023), [To] the Last [Be] Human (2021), Runaway (2018) and FAST (2017) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her collection PLACE (2012) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other Carcanet collections include Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: 'For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption — intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems.' Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. 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. In 2017 she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.Author photo credit © Dino Ignani, 2026.

'the many promises of vision'The Taken-Down God: Selected Poems 1997-2008, Jorie Graham(196pp, £14.95, Carcanet)In 1997 the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field drew together poems from Jorie Graham's first five collections; subsequently, The Taken-Down God selects from the next five collections: The Errancy; Swarm; Never; Overlord and Sea Change. This new volume complements the first selected poems for it is possible to see Graham approaching, again, the colossal themes of the divine and the material, art and life, but The Taken-Down God also stands independently. Indeed, it is a compelling selection, made by Graham herself, that details the personal and the global concerns that have informed Graham's work in the last decade and a half.In the past, Graham has described how ninety percent of her time is spent revising the poems she writes; attending to the music and metre of each line. It is no surprise then, that the poems in The Taken-Down God have been chosen and arranged with similar care. The selection feels orchestrated in the sense that the tone and subject matter of each poem echo one another not only between the poems themselves but also between the different collections. This will surely challenge the criticism that readers have often made over the fragmentary nature of Graham's writing.For example, 'the glance' is introduced as a preoccupation of Graham's in the 1997 collection, The Errancy. In a poem such as 'Thinking' Graham describes a crow and 'my steady glance on him, cindering at the glance-core where / it held him tightest, swelled and sucked'. Here, Graham displays an anxiety regarding how the eye perceives the natural world. Placing 'Thinking' before 'That Greater Than Which is Nothing' highlights 'the many promises of vision' that the latter poem describes. Furthermore, it initiates an exploration of these 'promises' in poems such as 'Woods' and 'Gulls' collected in 2002's Never.With The Taken-Down God it becomes tempting to suggest points at which Graham expresses particular ideas that direct her later writing; the poems selected from Never seem to indicate such a transition. Importantly, The Taken-Down God has included 'Evolution' with its endnote concerning 'the rate of extinction [that] is estimated at one every nine minutes.' Having explained how this time span 'inhabits' as well as 'structures' Never, it is appropriate that the poems that are included in this selected work concern temporality and environments. By parodying the writer's attempt to achieve a 'finished' representation of the natural world, 'Woods' provides a refreshing ecopoetic stance:- oh swagger of dwelling in place, in voice -surely one of us understands the importance.Understands? Shall I wave a 'finished' copy at youwhispering do you wish to come for lunch.Nor do I want to dwell on this.I cannot, actually, dwell on this.There is no home. One can stand out hereand gesture wildly, yes. One can say 'finished'and look into the woods, as I do now, here,but also casting my eye outto see (although that was yesterday) (in through the alleywaysof trees) the slantings of morninglight [...]'Gulls' dives ever more deeply into this subject matter and illustrates the 'en plein air' technique that Graham used to write Never. Engaged with 'porting' the natural world rather than reporting it, as Graham described in an interview, the poem becomes obsessively present-tense when considering the birds,[...] the whole flock rising and running justas the last film of darkness risesleaving behind, also rising and falling intiny upliftings [...]As the poem continues it becomes clear that the observer cannot keep up with the observation. As the scene changes with the movement of the sea, the light and the gulls, 'the words' are described 'leaping too, over their own / staying':So then it's sun in surf-breaking water: incircling, smearing: mind notknowing if it's still 'wave,' breaking onitself, small glider, of it it's 'amidst'(red turning feathery)or rather 'over' (the laciness of foambreak) or just what [...] it is.The Taken-Down God continues to explore these environmental concerns with poems from the collection that follows; Overlord. Indeed, these environmental concerns have led Graham to approach her early themes regarding the divine and material worlds from a different perspective. 'Please don't let us destroy / Your world. No the world', Graham implores in 'Praying (Attempt of May 9 '03)', and later, in another poem, Graham realises the harmful consequences of'the disappearance of hope' and so declares 'A new illusion must present / itself immediately'. In the light of this it is even more apparent that what is missing in the book is the poem that lends its name to the selected work. It seems like a strange omission as the poem, 'The Taken-Down God', that was originally included in Never would seem central to many of Graham's wonderfully articulated anxieties regarding belief, sight, writing and language.Yet this is a small problem in view of a selected poems that will appeal to both a reader who is familiar with Graham and who wishes to explore the links between her collections, and a reader who may wish to gain a first impression of Graham's work. As the book concludes with a selection from Sea Change, Graham begins to enact the declaration made earlier, that of 'A new illusion'. In 'Embodies' Graham asks 'what am I to do with my imagination' and later answers (in poems such as 'Root End') that the imagination must envision the future. This attempt to find a way of dealing with environmental change continues to be explored in Graham's most recent Place (2012): a collection that readers will surely turn to after The Taken-Down God in wanting to see the direction in which Graham's work progresses at this uncertain time.

• from The Errancy (1997)The Guardian Angel of the Little UtopiaUntitled One The Guardian Angel of Self-Knowledge The Scanning Thinking That Greater Than Which Nothing Studies in Secrecy Le Manteau de Pascal Recovered from the Storm Of the Ever-Changing Agitation in the Air from Swarm (2000)from The Reformation Journal (1)The Veil Underneath (Sibylline) Middle Distance Prayer (after Hölderlin) Underneath (Calypso) Two Days The Swarm from The Reformation Journal (2) Underneath (13) from Never (2002)PrayerIn/Silence Woods Dusk Shore PrayerGulls Ebbtide Evolution [One’s nakedness is very slow] Evolution [How old are you?] from Overlord (2005)OtherDawn Day One Soldatenfriedhof Upon Emergence Little Exercise Praying (Attempt of May 9 ’03) Praying (Attempt of June 14 ’03) Spoken from the Hedgerows Impressionism Praying (Attempt of April 19 ’04) from Sea Change (2008)Sea ChangeEmbodies Later in Life Nearing Dawn Day Off Root End The Violinist at the Window, 1918 Futures Undated Lullaby No Long Way Round Notes