Dear Candice and others interested in the Graham discussion.  I thought it
might be appropriate for me (snce Candice mentions The Errrancy) to copy here
a review I wrote of the Errancy published in the Hollins Critic (February
l998).  Here it is:

    "She started in film.  And quite by accident Jorie Graham turned to the
poem.  It was late, for a poet, that is, in her early twenties.  Apparently
it was only then that she began to read poetry.  She read and read and read,
going back centuries.  She loved language, the rhythms, the sound.  it is not
strange, therefore, that echoes of the poets remain scattered in her work.
Of course this is true for all poets but in the work of Jorie Graham perhaps
because she is a postmodernist, the scatterings of Shakespeare, Wyatt, Eliot,
Rilke, for example, seem more pronounced.  This was clear in her l996 Puitzer
Prze volumeThe Dream of the Unified Field, a selection from her first five
books of poetry.  It is even clearer now in her new volume under review where
lyricisim continues to be in evidence.

    "What is more in evidence is that Graham is a poet who is engaged.
Engaged at a time when spirituality seems dead or lurking, when materialism
is ever present and when what is out there in the soil, on branches of trees
where birds sing or in the old myths of Ovid or ina painting of Pascal's
Mantua by Magritte are to the poet the only prevailing legitimacies.  Though
the political miasmas are an undercurrent, however, as in the poem"Little
Requiem" where Graham evokes the extreme pain of the Russian poet Anna
Akhtmatova under Stalin, there is always something held back, so that it is
as if a veil hovers over the disaster, whether it be political or domestic.
Despite the details given, and the poet is one of themost observant of
contemporary poets -- "infinite detail the retina receives" -- of some
ominous or brutal event, such as a rape, the effect is covered up because of
a philosophical or a wavering suggestivenes that after all nature itself is
mindless of torture and prisons, "no hint -- no hint wherever my eye/scoops
and rips -- no hint in the pastels, in the shorn/fabulation of space/time."
The apologia through cosmic disclosure seems tot to be an attack on the
brutality of man but a kind of intellectual avoidance  Yes, Graham is a
constant observer -- "the open sea of my watching" -- a quiet observer, who
is not an an instrument of the activity around her, but its watch dog.
Keatsian "negative capability" is ingrained.

    "What is troubling, however, is that the lines, usually very long lines,
seem to float.  One yearns for some outrageous rhythm to break the ceaseless
flow.  the rhythms are too repetitive.  it is as if there's a mist
surrounding her questionings -- and they are constant -- even though it is
clear that the poet has not skipped the details,  horrendous as she
acknowledges they are, of our time.  It's like an Isadora Duncan dance.  her
veils whip her and her audience.  But what is the actual dance?

    "Part of the problem, strangely enough, is the language.  And Graham's
language is amazing.  One is always startled by its wide sources -- science,
philosophy, the street, current Pop usage, etc.  But then because of the
essential romanticism of the work -- the poet's frequent reomantic casting of
poems with the wind, the clouds, the fog, the flowers, -- the language can be
limply sweet (consider "underneathly glow") though this may be because some
of the poems were written when Gaham was very young and her "rhetoric" was
new.  (But did she have to include those now?)  Or thepoet,with a kind of
condescension, can address some undisclosed person as "my friend' or suddenly
call out, "bless him" or again, "the Lord God's'" ... in a non-religious
context.  her sudden interjections of "oh" or "ah" are flirtatiously cute.
Is it that at times as she says in one of her "Manteau" poems that she, who
clearly suffers often from despair, fears that in today's worl a poem can be
"so full of hollowness, so wild with rhetoric ."

    "But it is not rhetoric when in the fine poem "The Scanning" she writes:
"What shall we move with/now that the eye msut shut?  What shall we sift
with/now that themind must blur?When shall we undress the ceilings of dusk
with,/What shall we harvest the nothingness with"

    One of the strangest weaknesses in Graham 's poetry is her inability to
write of intimacy  Onlyoccasionallydo lovers touch beause as the poet writes
she is "unrelently" (sic) trying to make the other exist even as shenotes
that the soil yields thousands of tulips.  Is this inability related to a
frequent emptiness in her verse rhythms that denies an orgasmic utterance, a
certainty of being?  the poet is searching, searching for a "secret we don't
know we're trying to find."  All is the quiet though  insistent voice of the
searcher in exile, without fullness, with only the attempt
to touch, without the ability to yield to the final utterance of being."

............

[I do believe I have the copyright and, anyway, I am a contributing editor of
the magazine..  I do hope thelength is not disturbing.]

Harriet