[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, worrying the various epistemological issues that have been the concern of literary theorists: what is a text, what is an author, and (picking up on Heidegger) on what ground do they exist? In both learning and intellect, Graham is probably the equal of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, the very name of Graham's collection Materialism echoes The Waste Land. Materialism is Graham's homage to The Waste Land and, like that poem, explicitly prophetic. Like the Eliot poem, Graham's book teems not just with quotes but with long "adaptations" from such famous writers as Sir Francis Bacon (Novum Organum), Wittgenstein (the Tractatus), Dante (Canto XI of the Inferno) Walter Benjamin, Plato (Phaedo), Brecht ("A Short Organum of the Theatre"), Benjamin Whorf (Language, Thought, and Reality), Audubon (Missouri River Journals), and others. (The Audubon quote runs to five pages.) Graham's strategy recalls Eliot's famous dictum, "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal," and the way in which Eliot stuffed The Waste Land with quotations. The quotations are all from the most crucial parts of the texts quoted. They demonstrate for me that of all our poets, Graham has not only the most eclectic but the best intellectual taste. There is a danger, though. Some of the quotations may be too interesting. They compete with Graham's poetry, not always to her advantage.

Materialism evinces structure. It begins, in "Notes On the Reality of the Self," with a river (probably Heraclitian) and returns to that river at the end. "Notes" is ominous and beautiful: when Graham allows herself to be imagistic and descriptive (which is seldom), nobody can exceed her:

      Watching the river, each handful of it closing over the next,
      brown and swollen. Oaklimbs,
      gnawed at by waterfilm, lifted, relifted, lapped-at all day in
      this dance of non-discovery, All things are
      possible. Last year's leaves, coming unstuck from shore,
      rippling suddenly again with the illusion,
      and carried, twirling, shiny again and fat,
      towards the quick throes of another tentative
      conclusion,… Is this body the one
      I know as me?…

The issues Graham is dealing with are the same as Goedicke's, but Graham's tone is uniformly grave and, at certain points, melodramatic. "Melodrama," etymologically, is "drama" with the rhetoric of music (melos) added to augment the effect of the drama. The connotations of the word "melodramatic" are slightly invidious, suggesting that which is adventitious: emotional excess. In Materialism, melodrama, when it is present, happens at two levels. The first—the corny kind—when it occurs happens in Graham's diction. The second—the inventive kind—happens at the level of structure. Graham's poem "The Dream of the Unified Field" is sometimes melodramatic in diction. The event that starts the poem, "bringing you the leotard / you forgot to include in your overnight bag," leads to excess:

      Starting home I heard—bothering, lifting, then bothering again—
      the huge flock of starlings massed over our neighborhood
      these days; heard them lift and
      swim overhead through the falling snow
      as though the austerity of a true, cold thing, a verity,
      the black bits of their thousands of bodies swarming
                              then settling

The poem is filled with such moments, in which everything in a scene is dwelt upon as if in slow motion, with a violin accompaniment: the kind of quotidian observation that Emily Dickinson would have dispatched with a firecracker has been bloated into something akin to "The 1812 Overture."

At the structural level, however, Graham's "melodrama" is thrilling. The "music" added to the "drama" consists of the long quotations, and of the juxtapositions between verse and prose quotation, such as the decision to follow the poem "Concerning the Right to Life" with Graham's adaptation "from Sir Francis Bacon's NOVUM ORGANUM" or her placement of a passage "from Jonathan Edwards DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN" between "from Walt Whitman's CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY" and "The Break of Day," are telling.

In the penultimate poem, "Existence and Presence," we are reminded of the underlying epistemological problematic of the book—wherein is the ground of being and of the self?

     And how shall this soliloquy reverberate
     over the hillside? Who shall be
     the singleness over the yawning speckled lambency?
     I think I feel my thinking-self and how it
     stands—its condensation, its voice-track …
     An alphabet flew over, made liquid syntax for a while,
     diving and rising, forking, a caprice of clear meanings,
      right pauses …

The "condensation" of "my thinking-self is the poem we are reading. "I think I feel" is Cartesian. All Graham can be sure of is Mind. But the world, on whatever ground it stands, she finds to be fascinating, even lovely at times. At the conclusion of Materialism, we are returned to the river:

     It has a hole in it. Not only where I
                     concentrate.
     The river still ribboning, twisting up,
                    into its re-
     arrangements, chill enlightenments, tight-knotted
                           quickenings
     and loosenings—whispered messages dissolving
                        messengers—
     ...
     and the river of my attention laying itself down—
                          bending,
     reassembling—

Perhaps the Mind, through language, through poetry, can penetrate the world. Materialism is a daring and splendid book.