[In the following, excerpt, Boruch praises Graham's poems for their mystical, abstract quality.]

In Recitative's interview with Donald Sheehan, Merrill makes the distinction between Eliot, whose poems put "civilization under glass," and Stevens, who "continues to persuade us of having had a private life." Jorie Graham in her astonishing third collection, The End of Beauty, manages both. Like many of Dunn's poems, these are loose meditations, flung onto the page, staged accidents. Yet they are often enactments—frightening and ceremonial as the myths they shadow: Penelope, Orpheus, Eve, Daphne, all drawn with such fierce private light that abruptly it's clear why these stories have been prized for centuries. "But a secret grows, a secret wants to be given away," Graham writes of Eve's lethal plan. "For a long time it swells and stains its bearer with beauty." Miraculous things weight this book, from a real visit to the shrine of St. Claire up a "birthcry" road in Montefalco, where a woman "presses her beautiful nowhere / against the face-sized grille repeated speech / has oxidized green …" ("You say you've come to see / the saint"), to the more contemporary jolt of photographs for which the poet recasts the Hopi belief that they steal the spirit. "Rather that being-seen will activate that soul / until the flesh / is something that can be risen through." One feels in fact something rising through these poems, something terrible and wonderful, past control, certainly past the conscious truce in Graham's earlier collections between the autobiographical and the philosophical. It is the visionary gift of the child in "Imperialism," the final poem here, who is taken to bathe with thousands in the Ganges so she might "know the world" and finds instead horror, finds in her mother who would comfort only "… a plot, a / shape, one of the finished things, one of the / beauties … a thing / completely narrowed down to love … all / arms no face at all dear god, all arms—"