SOURCE: Review of Materialism, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 71, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 170-72.

In the excerpt below, Holden praises Graham's use of intellectualism and tone in Materialism.

Jorie Graham, in Materialism, runs the same risks as [Patricia] Goedicke—higher risks because her poetry is pronounced from an Olympian height. Graham is the Henry James of our poets, dramatizing time and again how language and ultra-sophisticated European civilization both tantalize and obscure what Stevens refers to in the final line of "The Man On the Dump" as "the truth: The the." Paradigmatic of a Graham poem would be, from the earlier book Erosion, "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt," a poem in which "Buchenwald" (birchwood) becomes a name for how the most civilized people could have turned out to be, in the Holocaust, the least. In books that follow, Land of Unlikeness and The End of Beauty, Graham becomes increasingly philosophical...