The Errancy is a pensive and erotic new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field. In these poems Jorie Graham approaches a number of numinous characters, each an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political or spiritual desire – desire seeking its place in an age of betrayed values, where dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts.

Error is explored as the heroic form of finding one’s way—a purposeful wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage in which the heart’s longing is guide. Lovers celebrate the body; angels deliver celestial warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal; a few soldiers sleep before a sepulchre while something inexplicable happens behind their backs.

Sacred and spiritual, celestial and corporeal, coexist: The Errancy confirms John Ashbery’s description of Graham as ‘one of the finest poets writing today’.