SOURCE: Irwin, Mark. “Kite's Body, and Beyond.” Denver Quarterly 31, no. 1 (summer 1996): 60-7.

In the following review of The Dream of the Unified Field, Irwin traces Graham's development and investigates recurring themes in her works.

I.

For over twenty years Jorie Graham has been producing poems that beautifully question that movement between body and spirit. While other poets may write about desire, Ms. Graham's poems are in themselves desire, inseparable from the very breath and air of it. If her earlier poems seem more accessible to readers, it is because their content, their sheer energy has not yet broken the seams of their form. And if her later work bears gaps, holes, stitches, it seems only predictable from a poet so obsessed with the distance between body and spirit. Her words seem not so much willed as they are inevitable. In “Tennessee June,” from her first book, oppressive summer...