SINCE REGION OF Unlikeness alluded to Exodus 33 and God's letting Moses see God from behind, but not face to face, I noticed that the cover of Materialism featured a drawing (based on a Mantegna painting) in which we see Christ's back, but not his face. Of this collection, too, we could say that God is absent, but not exactly, and that God is present, but not exactly. Divinity is present in its absence, maybe.
There are four longer poems (of twelve, eight, ten, and fifteen pages) in the second half of the book--"Annunciation with a Bullet in It," "The Dream of the Unified Field," "Manifest Destiny," and "The Break of Day"--that seemed to me central to the collection. I'm probably wrong about that--the "adaptations" and the five poems titled "Notes of the Reality of the Self" seem likelier to be the main building blocks, and those five shorter poems at the end. "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "Manifest Destiny" did make it into Graham's first book of selected poems, which even carried the title of the former, and they certainly got my attention.
"Annunciation with a Bullet in It" and "Break of Day" use the adaptation technique, rearranging existing texts: Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz by Isabella Leitner in "Annunciation," and passages from several famous writers (Plato, Flaubert, Heidegger, Sir James Frazer, and Marx) in "Break of Day." That the texts were more arranged than composed by Graham may account for their being skipped in the selected poems of The Dream of the Unified Field, but they both present perceiving, reasoning subjects in earnest engagement with matter and, possibly, with the immaterial. Isabella hears an angel saying "FEAR NOT" (as Gabriel said to Mary) even in Auschwitz, and the juxtaposition of Plato's Allegory of the Cave with Emma Bovary will get you thinking about what counts as real even before Heidegger and Marx show up.
"Manifest Destiny" juxtaposes a visit to a (Civil War, I think) museum, the battle of Shiloh (especially the fight in the Peach Orchard), and...Leda and the Swan. I'm not sure whether Graham has the Yeats poem in mind--her note mentions a series of photographs by Diane Michener, not Yeats--but the middle section of the poem marries beauty to terror much as the Yeats poem does, as well as the sense that the conjunction of the divine and the human can portend catastrophe.
"The Dream of the Unified Field" is one of Graham's strongest poems. It begins simply: her daughter is having a sleepover at a friend's house, but has forgotten her leotard, and Graham is bringing it to her. The walk down a plain (Iowa City?) street with a leotard unlatches memories of Graham's own dance classes in Rome, in a Europe not all that far past the trauma of the war, and her teacher saying, when she thinks none of her students can hear her, "No one must believe in God again." Then Graham, leaving after dropping off the leotard, sees her daughter through a window, dancing...a lovely moment. Maybe Europe and its blood orgies have been left behind, our children will be safe and happy? But then something triggers a scene of another historical trauma, the landing of the Europeans in the western hemisphere, and all that entailed.
Graham writes enough about the Holocaust that I wondered whether she was Jewish. Her mother was, according to the internet, but her father was Catholic, and growing up in Rome, she was exposed to Catholicism a lot more than she was to Judaism. Still, Jewish connections seem to matter in both "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "From the New World," and I count those as two of her strongest and most characteristic poems.
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