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).
Graham conducts her meditations at one remove, through Piero and Signorelli, and the paintings do work the poems sometimes can't do alone. Solemnity is the house style: no humor, every perception flagged as metaphysics. The thin trembling lines can read as imposed gravity. If her abstraction loses you here, her later books will be worse.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
