ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a close reading of Jorie Graham's poem, 'At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body'. A contemporary American poet and literary descendant of Wallace Stevens, Graham is interested in ideas of embodiment, perspective and deferral. Signorelli's painstaking efforts to develop such life-like figures was in part a response to a conflict within the Church at that time over the depiction of naked bodies in sacred art. Jorie Graham the European-American, the philosopher/film-maker finds in poetry a way of expressing and celebrating the very divisions, opposites and antitheses that are so much a part of her own life experience. Poetry is the vehicle through which this philosopher turned film-maker turned poet explores the perceived gaps between abstraction and image, spirit and flesh, mind and body. There is a multi-layeredness to this poem, as there is in all of Graham's work.
