SOURCE: "Jorie Graham: Art and Erosion," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 373-95.

In the following essay, Costello considers the visual images at the center of the poetry in Erosion.

Jorie Graham emerged in the 1980s as a major poet, distinguished for her philosophical depth, her sensuous vision, the grandeur of her style and themes. In a decade of poetry stigmatized for its shrunken ambition, or sidetracked by politics and ideology, she celebrated the spiritual and metaphysical reach of art. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham limited her meditation primarily to tentative reflections based on natural objects. Erosion (1983) marked a striking maturity for this poet in finding a focus to the roving eye of Hybrids, and in understanding the iconic and even sacramental nature of her mind. Her language in this volume is marked by eloquence and sententious boldness, and she identifies...