SOURCE: "Mapping the Air," in New York Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 19, November 21, 1991, pp. 50-6.

In the following excerpt, Vendler argues that Graham expands on her earlier work, pushing forward her style of lyrical poetry.

Like [Adrienne] Rich, Jorie Graham, a younger poet now teaching at the University of Iowa, uses vignettes and anecdotes, but to raise metaphysical, more than ethical, questions. Graham's grand metaphysical theme is the tension between existence and death. These are its ultimate terms; but the tension is also expressed as that between other polarities, such as continuity and closure, indeterminacy and outline, being and temporality, or experience and art. Graham sees human beings as creatures capable both of "intentionality"—direct-edness of aim—and of suspension in moments of pure being without aim.

These two inherent, inescapable capacities are fatal to each other. Nothing goes nowhere, however much we might want it to. Courtship...