SOURCE: Jarman, Mark. “The Grammar of Glamour: The Poetry of Jorie Graham.” New England Review 14, no. 4 (fall 1992): 252-61.

In the following review, Jarman surveys the first four of Graham's books of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, and Region of Unlikeness.

“The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Eve's famous excuse suggests that she has not only been tricked but charmed. To use an old Scottish word, a glamour has been thrown over her eyes, in her case, the allurement of knowledge. For Jorie Graham, the beguiling serpent is time; its succession and linearity give birth to history. Her poetry seeks to break the spell that holds us in time, requiring that history have a beginning, middle, and end, and that art, especially literature and particularly poetry, be mimetic and made up of similitude, metaphor, and narrative or “storyline” as she...