Career
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. 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 lieutenant '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.
