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modern thought and literature: Dorothy Wordsworth, Margaret
Fuller, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among others. For A. F .
Moritz, by contrast, "the tradition" is not a collection of things that
have survived but a ghostly emanation from the traces of things
largely vanished: "Now and again some few among our proverbs /
are shown by science to be not wholly meaningless," the speaker of
the volume's title poem wryly observes. Jorie Graham, who is the
most radical of the three in matters of poetics, is curiously the most
conservative in matters of tradition; she alone still "believes" in the
mythology - in the sense that she finds in the lore of classical and
biblical antiquity as well as in medieval legend and spirituality
meaningful figures of thought, a living figurative language of un–
diminished eloquence, truthfulness, and authority.
Graham's book is also by far the most difficult, intellectually
demanding, and technically innovative-compared both to the other
volumes reviewed here and to the work she has produced to date .
Her new poems are not only about personal relations but about rela–
tion itself and about meaning as a function of relation - of the rela–
tion between people , between artist and medium, between poet and
public, between present and past. In the third section of "Noli Me
Tangere" Graham writes:
I have seen how the smoke here
inhabits a space
in the body of air it must therefore displace,
and the tree-shaped gap the tree inhabits,
and the tree-shaped gap the tree
invents. Siren ,
reader,
it is here , only here,
in this gap
between us ,
that the body of who we are
to have been
emerges:
True to such an understanding of the possibilities of meaning,
Graham has produced a series of meditations and portraits that ex–
press particular situations or scenes as dynamic configurations
whose informing structure derives from the subjects of mythology,
scripture, hagiography, art, and legend.
