RaveThe Boston ReviewA good 'selected poems' turns a career back into a voice. The individual books give way again to the maker, now editor as well as composer. Jorie Graham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Dream of the Unified Field did this to wide acclaim in 1996. From the New World, Graham’s second selected poems, does it again, reducing and arranging her abundant career into a fraction of its breadth. The selection leads readers into Graham’s later books’ glorious assaults on the lyric ... in the best of From the New World, meditations lead the mind into improvisations more matter of fact than full of grand gesture. The early work collected here teems with moments of observation and description lifted into thought, moments that alternately embrace and attack reality ... From the New World is more than simply a collection of parts of collections; it is the story of how the lyric poem’s claim to give the reader a bit of experience, 'an extra life,' might be credibly made.
