Overlord

Description

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How - in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear - does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far does our capacity to be present, to be fully ourselves, depend on our relationship to an 'other' and our understanding of and engagement with otherness itself? What powers lord over us and what do we, as a species, and as souls, lord over? Jorie Graham, in this her most personal and urgent collection to date, undertakes to explore these questions, often from vantage points geographically and historically 'other'. Many of the poems occur along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and the Normandy landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. This work meditates on our new world, ghosted and threatened by competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, 'free'.

Jorie Graham is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Carcanet also publishes The Errancy, Swarm and Never. She divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University.

'Graham's best book in at least a decade' - Publishers Weekly. 'Graham's ninth poetry collection is arguably her most impassioned meditation on the nature of human presence and the possibility of belief in a diminished, fallen world.' - Library Journal. 'Graham writes with breathtaking precision about the helplessness one feels in the face of suffering...Stunning.' - Booklist.