Her early life alone warrants a biopic. Born in 1950 to a sculptor and a journalist, she was raised in Italy and France. In 1968 she was involved in the student protests in Paris, and went on to study film-making in New York. She then married into the Graham family, publishers of the ­Washington Post, at the time of the Watergate scandal. After that, it might be said, her career became more conventional, though no less glamorous. Moving to Iowa, she began teach on America’s most prest­igious creative-writing programme, and later succeeded Seamus Heaney to a ­professorship at Harvard. Graham’s celebrity was confirmed when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for The Dream of the Unified Field, a selection from her first five books. The Taken-Down God selects from her next five, which appeared over the