Erosion (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

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Summary: Graham's "eroding" poetry...
Review: EROSION, Graham's second volume of poems, is quite different from any other she has published. The poems themselves are strung elegantly like a pearl necklace. Each is quite linear in appearance and tone, crafted with clever, audible rhythms and rhymes. Most of the poems focus on a particular artist or saint or philospher--which is refreshing for those of us who bore easily of traditional nature poetry. Taken together, the poems, like many of those in recent book SWARM, deal with the seen & the unseen, the real & the imagined, the actual & the conceptual. EROSION is a bold step outward in American poetry.

Rating:
Summary: Jorie Graham's breathtaking first real mastery of poetry
Review: This is where she really mastered poetry, with the infinite elliptical loop & music & self-awareness & endless mysteriousness of Salmon, & in other poems playing, with great precision, with who the speaker is, & doing so much more with the book as a whole. With her first book it was clear that she would be a very special poet, & with this her second she absolutely mastered so many aspects of poetry in such a visionary way that she could confidently proceed from there to the wild avant-garde of her third book, The End of Beauty, & beyond. Reading Erosion, you can tell it's before she broke into the later experimentation she's now famous for. The style is very different. Here the lines are usually shorter; the themes are ambitious ("History" -- including but not focusing on a pitchfork opening slow holes in someone), but not as ambitious as later; the poems are shorter. But I think in poems in Erosion when she says things like "how clean the mind is" while commenting briefly on lemon skins, & elsewhere has a garment closing "from privacy to eternity" one could tell how brilliant she was & how limitless her poetry could be. It's all larger in ambition & scope than her first book. She was progressing already, as at the beginning of a parabolic curve not far out yet from the vertex.

Rating:
Summary: Jorie Graham's breathtaking first real mastery of poetry
Review: This is where she really mastered poetry, with the infinite elliptical loop & music & self-awareness & endless mysteriousness of Salmon, & in other poems playing, with great precision, with who the speaker is, & doing so much more with the book as a whole. With her first book it was clear that she would be a very special poet, & with this her second she absolutely mastered so many aspects of poetry in such a visionary way that she could confidently proceed from there to the wild avant-garde of her third book, The End of Beauty, & beyond. Reading Erosion, you can tell it's before she broke into the later experimentation she's now famous for. The style is very different. Here the lines are usually shorter; the themes are ambitious ("History" -- including but not focusing on a pitchfork opening slow holes in someone), but not as ambitious as later; the poems are shorter. But I think in poems in Erosion when she says things like "how clean the mind is" while commenting briefly on lemon skins, & elsewhere has a garment closing "from privacy to eternity" one could tell how brilliant she was & how limitless her poetry could be. It's all larger in ambition & scope than her first book. She was progressing already, as at the beginning of a parabolic curve not far out yet from the vertex.