SOURCE: "Ascent into Limbo," in The New Republic, July 11, 1994, pp. 27-30.

In the following review of Materialism, Vendler discusses Graham's rhythm structure and the connection between structure and subject in these poems.

Jorie Graham, brought up in Italy by American parents and educated in French schools, has published five books of verse, beginning with Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts(1980) and continuing with Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991) and her newest book, Materialism. The poetry has always been strikingly ambitious in subject matter, genre-exploration and metrical invention. Like all new poets, Graham has mostly been discussed in terms of themes, which range, in her work, from notes on the reality of the self to the inflictions of history, from mutual corrections of identity in marriage to the nature of modern war.

For me, it is fundamentally Graham's rhythms that are irresistible. Here she is, riding...