SOURCE: Hudgins, Andrew. “The Honest Work of the Body: Jorie Graham's Erosion.” Shenandoah 46, no. 2 (summer 1996): 48-59.

In the following essay, Hudgins examines several poems from Graham's second book, Erosion, and considers how her work has evolved psychologically and philosophically.

In her first five books, from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts in 1980 to Materialism in 1993, Jorie Graham has shifted from writing poems to writing poetry. She has moved away from crafting poems as complete objects in themselves and toward creating a sensibility that unfolds across poems. The distinction isn't new. It's a critical catch phrase that Keats wrote poems and Shelley poetry. Ezra Pound moved from Personae—poems—to The Cantos—poetry—and never looked back. In her recent books, the considerable power that Jorie Graham draws from her obsessive vision and the digressive interweaving of themes, images and ideas comes at the cost of a good deal...