SOURCE: Ulmer, James. “Air and Earth: Recent Books by Jorie Graham and Ellen Bryant Voight.” Black Warrior Review 15, no. 2 (spring 1989): 136-43.

In the following excerpt, Ulmer offers a favorable assessment of The End of Beauty, stressing the influences on Graham's poetry.

Graham's The End of Beauty and Voight's The Lotus Flowers are third books by poets who are embarking on distinguished mid-careers. Their contrasting methods represent divergent strains in contemporary American poetry. Graham's speculation and self-conscious emphasis on process enacting itself on the page derives from Eliot and the post-modernism of Stevens and Ashbery, while Voight's impulse to re-enact the past and inhabit a vital landscape continues a tradition represented by Emerson, Frost, and James Wright. Both books extend and enliven the rich diversity of contemporary poetry in America.

The surfaces of Graham's poems are complex and often not immediately clear or welcoming. She is an ambitious poet...