Erosion
The collection that announced Graham as the heir to Stevens and Bishop. Her early poems meditate on Italian paintings, the soul's materiality, and the failure of representation with a gravity that invites rereading. Her later work (The Dream of the Unified Field, Swarm) became more formally radical; Erosion is where she was most concentrated. Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field (1996).
The complaint that recurs most: Graham asks abstraction to do the work image should be doing. One reader puts it plainly, “abstractions to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting,” and another says her habit of routing every scene through her own interior process ends up “rendering the poem's objects anaemic and blurry.” Readers disagree about which poems land, calling the book uneven, some poems working and others they “just can't get into at all.” A recurring frustration is not being sure a poem has been understood even after several passes; one reviewer asks flatly, “Has anyone figured this book out yet?” Someone who first read it years earlier found it thinner on a second look than memory had it, more effortful than the poems she recalled.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
