SOURCE: “Two at the Gap: Jorie Graham and Susan Howe,” in Partisan Review, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1997, pp. 497–503.

In the following review, Peck explores the major themes and poetic techniques of Howe's poetry.

A dramatic poetics, which holds back from statement and assessment to explore mood and its makings, may grow expansive. With Jorie Graham's pursuit of just such expansiveness over two decades, which appreciative readers call “metaphysical,” we may follow something in transit between opposites in recent literary taste. These opposites are an organic, unified natural object—which optimistic Romanticism has long since nurtured, but which Modernism curiously favored also—and the disruptive object of postmodern Romanticism, say in Heidegger and de Man. From the Aeolian harp and the plum in the icebox to the Ding an sich with a depth charge. Graham's route between these enlarges on Eliot's, tracing a sensibility that would close the gap of...