[In the following excerpt, Frost reviews Materialism and explores Graham's manipulation of Western philosophy, praising her handling of difficult ideas.]

Jorie Graham, a Euro-American, ponders … dilemmas centered on the theme of cultural inheritance. Uncomfortable with the perceived gap between language and the material world, she wonders, "Is this body the one / I know as me. How private these words?" These two books diverge in tone and intent, but they share a concern central to women's lives: wresting a female identity from the vast store of white male traditions.

In this fifth collection [Materialism], Graham is even more rigorously philosophical than in her previous books—most recently, Region of Unlikeness (1992) and The End of Beauty (1987). At stake here is the whole body of Western thought. The "materialism" of her title refers not to American middle-class values (although Marx does make an appearance in one poem), but to the physical world—to matter and life in their troubling otherness and flux, and to our attitude toward that world, including our own bodies. As in most Western philosophy, there is a marked distance in Graham's work between subjective experience and the objective world. Lines from the poem "Subjectivity," in which she explains her use of the third person to refer to herself, capture this divide: "I say she because my body is so still / in the folds of daylight." Physicality can even become a mere afterthought. An aside in a poem called "Invention of the Other" runs: "(the body! she thought, as if she had forgotten it)."

Apparently we risk losing awareness of what is most basic to our existence—the body itself—and the culprit is rational thought, represented by the philosophical tradition, here given a voice. Graham has included passages from (among others) Plato, Bacon, Dante, Wittgenstein, Whitman, Benjamin and—only slightly out of place in this procession—McGuffey (from his New Fifth Reader of 1857). It is a bold gesture, one typical of Graham's restless poetry, to include landmarks of Western thought and then, in effect, talk back to them—to challenge even as she exploits the familiar mind/ body split.

Although most of the quotations are separate from the poems, Graham does carry on a dialogue with them and the "great works" they stand in for. Excerpting can be a form of rewriting, and her selections often undermine the writer's original intentions. I was surprised to learn that the great nature-lover, Audubon, detailed the killing of "specimens" that served as excellent subjects for his sketches. One anecdote found here involves a buffalo—an ironic reminder to the contemporary reader of our destruction of this country's native inhabitants: "The head was cut off, as well as one fore and one hind foot. The head is so full of symmetry, and so beautiful, that I shall have a drawing of it to-morrow." In Graham's excerpt, Audubon's fine aesthetic sense supplies no regret for the animal's killing and dismemberment. Ethics and aesthetics, she implies, can remain dangerously disjunct.

Graham reflects on the artist's complicity in a similar act of violence in "Subjectivity." The speaker discovers a monarch butterfly whose beauty captivates her: it is "butter yellow, fever yellow, / yellow of acid and flax, / lemon and chrome." Finding the creature inert, she assumes that it's dead, and is preparing to "make it flat" and insert it into a collection when a friend tells her that the butterfly is still alive. The object of her gaze reclaims the poem:

      the yellow thing, the specimen,
      rising up of a sudden out of its
             envelope of glances—
 
      a bit of fact in the light and then just light.

The speaker manages to elude her own desire to possess, but the borders between preservation and destruction, artistic "appreciation" and imperialism, prove thin indeed.

This kind of moral dilemma leads Graham into territories she has explored in earlier work—the fields of myth and history. Juxtapositions of different narratives and historical periods within her poems suggest unexpected connections. "Annunciation with a Bullet in It," for example, joins scenes from a Holocaust survivor's diary with an account of her dog's death following a shooting. In "Concerning the Right to Life," descriptions of an abortion clinic during a protest alternate with descriptions of the speaker's concern for her fever-ridden daughter; the poem closes with excerpts from Christopher Columbus' diary, which remind us of colonization—also a trope for women's bodies.

For Graham, these connections are buried all too deeply in our culture. She presents a series of experiments by Sir Francis Bacon, the early scientist and preeminent humanist, that seems, in its very objectivity, to forecast our fatal disconnection from the material world and one another: "We took a glass egg, with a small hole at one end; we drew out the air by violent suction at this hole, and then closed the hole with the finger, immersed the egg in water, and then removed the finger." The pursuit of knowledge is mechanical and never-ending, as an ellipsis at the excerpt's conclusion (which occurs mid-sentence) indicates: "We took a leaden globe …" The "scientific method" involves a detachment of self from other that Graham also senses when she writes; in "In the Hotel," she tries to bridge the gap between herself and the reader, between what she writes and what we feel: "What do you / want, you, listening here with me now? Inside the / monologue, / what would you insert? What word?"

Virtually all the poems in Materialism are painful meditations on why such efforts fail. "Steering Wheel" describes a moment in which the speaker, backing a car out of a driveway, notices a "veil of leaves / suctioned up by a change in current." While the poem seems to meditate on the most external of facts—leaves swirling, a hat caught by wind coursing down a street—the poem is finally about the fear of entrapment in one's own subjective experience. The final lines reflect on the meaning of the most basic rules of motion and gravity, "the law / composed of updraft, downdraft,"

       and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,
       and the part of the law which is the world's waiting
       and the part of the law which is my waiting,
       and then the part which is my impatience—now; now?—
 
       though there are, there really are,
       things in the world, you must believe me.

The closing plea reveals the speaker's uncertainty about objective reality, "things in the world" other than the self. Graham charges her lines with longing for the "real" world. But how can we break through "solitude" to reach "the world's waiting"? Her answer seems to be that the observing eye, the poetic self that is aware of both the material and the spiritual, must remain utterly self-conscious. Acute observation is the closest we come to genuine knowledge—closer than speculative philosophy has taken us.

As in "Steering Wheel," the most moving poems in the book use philosophical language with a double charge. In Graham's hands, the very diction of rational thought suddenly expresses intimacy, passion, longing. "The whole cannot exist without the parts," a speaker in one of the many sections of "The Break of Day" asserts. Then comes the voice of a different self, pleading for union: "Stay, stay." The "parts" are suddenly two people, full of need, and the philosophical dictum is transformed. The shift in tone bears witness to one of Graham's great gifts—turning rhetoric against itself and allowing a simple moment or utterance to unfold in all its nuances. In Materialism, an ambitious collage of the language of "great works" and the language of poetry, Graham responds to rational philosophy with the poet's rigorous and practiced vision.