SOURCE: Isaacson, Lisa. “Ad Interim: 2000—A Delayed Reading Lightly Attended.” Denver Quarterly 28, no. 4 (spring 1994): 136-41.

In the following review, Isaacson discusses Materialism, commenting on Graham's incorporation of earlier material—her own, as well as others'—into the poems in this volume.

Not mere succession of Strokes, Sightless Narration 

(Pound, from “Canto VII”)

Jorie Graham's previous collection of poems, Region of Unlikeness, projected pursuit upon a compositional scene that included the earlier The End of Beauty. In the former's heavily forwarded book, epigraphs accumulated not to illuminate the matter of Graham's arrival on the scene of her book's first poem, or first authority. Rather, the choral effect lifted the singular authorities into a vanishing bullseye view of the transcendent moment. The unapproachable next generation's tunneling back into the natural world, for example, involved Melville: “Swim away from me, will ye?” (in Forward to Region of Unlikeness). Jorie Graham's newest...