PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIf Graham has a fault, it is that she has sometimes, as in the poem 'From the New World,' allowed her conceptual points to run roughshod over her poetry’s quality. This is increasingly the case in the books that coincide by no coincidence with the Bush years — Never, Overlord, Sea Change. Her ecological worrying can devolve into hectoring, and her philosophical questing can rip past a reader’s patience too easily when her concepts and her administrations to sensed experience aren’t subtended by formal rigor.
And yet, reading From the New World, and especially Graham’s earlier work, I am reminded of her unparalleled capabilities. I firmly believe that Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last 40 years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening.
