Jorie Graham is about as famous as a poet gets in North America. She teaches at Harvard, won the Pulitzer in 1996, and has even given rise to gossipy websites about 'favouring' former students. Despite this, she is still relatively unknown in the UK – a shame, since she is not only one of the most recognised but one of the most original poets of her generation. Risking obscurity and even preciousness, at her best she fuses cerebral and spiritual, doubt and commitment; and Overlord, driven in part by America’s war on Iraq, contains some of her most satisfying work yet.
 
These poems are both hugely, publicly political and intensely private, a simultaneity that allows Graham to explore how collective action blossoms from, and affects, the individual’s idea of himself. In ‘Praying (Attempt of June 8 ’03)’, the speaker lies beside her sleeping lover, thinking of the war happening elsewhere, its ‘stitchery of fire’. The two scenes, bedroom and battlefield, bleed into one another: the counting done to fall asleep becomes the counting of the dead, and the counting of stars by a child, all part of the same dream in which ‘the number drops out of mind’. Elsewhere, in ‘Europe’, a walk on Omaha beach becomes a meditation on the future we create for our children, which is like the space occupied by electrons, both ‘real’ and ‘made entirely of / prediction’.

Something similar could be said of Graham’s style. Her poems are not polished lyric artifacts, although she is more than capable of such effects – the perfect simile, like ‘I search for gratitude, as if feeling around in a / park after nightfall for a lost hat’ (‘Praying (Attempt of Feb 6 ’04)’). Instead, they are tissues of thought, tracings of the expansive, uncertain movement of consciousness. Objecting to what she termed ‘the marketplace of truth’, where poems are ‘nailed down’ by interpreters, she resists any kind of finality. This is not to say there is no truth, in the crudely postmodern sense – you could hardly leave this collection without a renewed sense of the pity of war – but that truth is a matter of process: ‘Zeno reasoned we would / never get there. Reason in fact never gets there. But we step back onto the path each time’ (‘Dawn Day One’).

These are incremental effects. Graham imagines a plant tipping towards the sun, seeing no movement from second to second, but having to admit that ‘yes, yes, in the end it / was in a different direction’ (‘Praying (Attempt of May 9 ’03)’). Reading her poetry is much the same –no sudden epiphanic flash, but a gradual swivelling towards the light.