Graham's [poems] concentrate on themselves. The result is only rarely narcissistic; more often it's an absorbed and absorbing effort to map the boundaries of language—which for him have become more definite and restrictive as he's grown older. They're emphasised, no doubt, by his failure to secure a large attentive public; in one late poem he touchingly admits:

                   Speaking to you and not
                   Knowing if you are there
                   Is not too difficult.
                   My words are used to that.

This imprisonment within the self is all the more distressing for having followed a time of expansive confidence. Throughout the Forties and early Fifties his neo-Apocalyptic sympathies led him to undertake such sustained flights of rhetorical fancy that there seems something penitential about the austerity of his recent work.

Graham's anxiety that 'words make light of us' doesn't become his dominant theme until The Nightfishing (1955). The principal reason for its emergence is an enforced preoccupation with loss; his brother's death compels him to examine the limitations of poetry as a means of comfort and communication. In doing so, it forges a link between writing (or speaking) and mortality which holds for the rest of his career. 'The Nightfishing' itself argues that 'each word speaks its own speaker to his death', and almost all his subsequent poems admit that silence continually seeks to dissolve them—as well as their author—and assert its own intransigent permanence.

The fact that 15 years passed before his next collection appeared suggests that it nearly succeeded. But in retrospect Graham seems to have spent the time recreating his confidence in different terms. In Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970) and Implements In Their Places (1977) he frequently confesses to feeling inadequate and vulnerable, yet insists on remaining talkative. This isn't simply a matter of style—almost unpunctuated stanzas and headlong rhythms—but of content: on every page he recognises the problem of 'having to construct the silence first / To speak out on', and then wrestles with processes of selection and recall to prove the purpose of articulacy. An elegy for Peter Lanyon, 'The Thermal Stair', defines it with resilient conviction:

        The poet or painter steers his life to maim
 
        Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love
        Imagined into words or pain to make
        An object that will stand and will not move.

It's this affection for the world he can never quite express that prevents Graham from merely wandering round in 'the language wood'. People and places repeatedly lure him out of it, and encourage him to prove that his words can deal with happiness, affection and grief as subtly as they can analyse their own shortcomings.