Review by Booklist Review
This selection of Graham's poems demonstrates the full range of her poetic gifts. The early poems exhibit a rigorous, analytical viewing of the physical world but seem the necessary step to her later, more fluid poems. The End of Beauty was a pinnacle for Graham because in it, she broke form, broke free of pure mind, and broke away from tradition. Graham's philosophic perception is at its best when skewed, turned upside-down, blown away. Then it leads her into the lyrical, universal "fields" of vision where she dramatically sets herself apart from so many other poets who work strictly in autobiographical and narrative verse. One always has a sense of Graham's reaching, plummeting, that she "doesn't think it has / reached deep / enough so goes in / after it" ("Age of Reason" ). Using language--repetition, variation, recontextualization--to reveal new meaning and drive the poems rhythmically, her work has intensity and urgency. Combining great vision like Blake's, a Dickinsonian philosophical introspection, and a richly modern sensuality, Graham is a major talent who has certainly, already, made her mark in the world. --Janet St. John
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Graham's complex, faceted poems glint powerfully with compressed energy and suggest another meaning for the term atmospheric pressure. Her rendering of experience yields a dense, layered vision in which simplicity is rarely found and conclusions are likely to be double-edged. In ``Imperialism,'' concerned with shadows and a difficult relationship, she recalls being taken to Calcutta as a child where, ``to know the world,'' she must observe the funeral pyres and later step into the Ganges (``utensils and genitalia and incandescent linens(I was nine)''). Elsewhere a photo of a Holocaust atrocity takes on, in its description and its context, a necessary semblance of beauty: "`I`ll give ten thousand dollars to the man/ who proves the holocaust really/ occurred,'" she quotes. Themes and imagery recur: birds, angels, wings, madness; hands at work, passions political and personal. Graham's keen interest in paintings yields a continual shifting of the thin border between art and life. In ``The Phase After History,'' two birds trapped inside a housewhich suggests self-consciousness or a pagefly at the windows seeking escape, while on one floor a man takes up a knife to slice off his face. Too compact for a single reading, this selection from previous collections provides several ``self portraits'' that help give her thought grounding. This volume is perfectly orchestrated, each poem extending the poem before it. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this volume of poems culled from her first five books, Graham tenaciously confronts mystery through, and despite, language itself. Her philosophical engagements with lived experience, ontology, and time are akin to, yet transfigure, the trends of comtemporary poetry: "To see what I was meant to see/To be pried up out of my immortal soul,/up, into the sizzling quick." She has grown from an ambitious poetry of nature (seeing its creatures as "a code as urgent as elegant" in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, LJ 5/15/80), through a fascination with myth and theology, to a new synthesis of these concerns with an awareness of the universal in the everyday. At times she seems too willing to trade poetry's resemblance to song for an intense intellectualism, but her best poems are profound, memorable meditations on being. Bolstered by prestigious awards and the loving attention of prominent critics such as Helen Vendler, Graham has become one of our most important living poets, and this collection is an essential introduction to her work. Highly recommended.Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
