Barbara Jordan (poet)

Barbara Jordan (born 1949) is an American poet and academic. She is a professor of English at University of Rochester, and Plutzik Memorial Series director. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Sulfur, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harvard Review.

Awards

 * 1989 Barnard Women Poets Prize

Reviews
Barbara Jordan's second collection, while more syntactically scumbled and abstract than her first, proceeds in a similar manner. Like a botanist crossed with a postulant, Jordan maps onto the natural world the disquieted speculations of a religious contemplative. In "Meander," Jordan calls on the renowned Bishop of Hippo to illustrate her method: "Consciousness as landscape, / Augustine was mindful of it. `The caverns of memory,' / he wrote, / `the mountains and hills of my high imagination.'" The consciousness that permeates Jordan's landscapes, however, is of a decidedly more modern, Poundian variety.