ISBN:

URL:

Keywords:

Full Text:

Jorie Graham published her first book only sixteen years ago, but she has already produced a body of writing that feels like the accumulation of a lifetime. Like Yeats, who early in his career cautioned suspicious readers that "it is myself that I remake,' Graham has been driven to turn against her own best discoveries, risking everything she has achieved. Each of her books is a new beginning; in Materialism, each poem feels like an interrogation of the one preceding it. Graham has been unwilling to settle for anything settled, and she sometimes discards achievements that other poets would be willing to nurture for a long time. A different kind of writer would winnow more scrupulously in
private, sharing only the distilled residue of her dissatisfaction. But Gra- ham's most self-conscious interrogations of poetry are driven by a kind of seriousness that impresses the most skeptical reader. The more she writes, the more necessary—the more truly elucidating—her public agon seems. Graham's achievement seems big because she is satisfied with so little....