Erosion (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

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.

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.