W.S. Graham's poem ‘The Constructed Space’ in Malcolm Mooney's Land has become something of a landmark for readers of his poetry. Here Graham, despite his frequent refusals to offer easy interpretations of or explanations for his writing, seems to be providing a remarkably concise enactment of what so often happens, or nearly happens, in it. In line with much of his other work, what happens in ‘The Constructed Space’ has to do with the limits of speech, with the attempt to approach the other that is hoped to exist beyond the limits of the self, and with the discovery of the ‘true’ self in this act of transcendence.

The poem opens with the word ‘Meanwhile’ and ends in the present: the self discovered in the act of writing is ‘More truly now this abstract act become’. It begins, therefore, in a transitory, fleeting time, and the immediate present of its ending, ‘now’, is the poem's closest approach to the infinite and the timeless. Although past, present and future are included in the poem (and correspond loosely to its three stanzas), as a whole it has something of a carpe diem quality to it in the sense that memory and anticipation of the end serve to intensify the poem's movement towards its ultimate ‘now’.

The last line's confidence follows, however, both moments of apparent authority, when the speaker says, for instance, ‘It is like that, remember’, and absolute negations of such authority, when Graham drastically confesses complete uncertainty:

Structurally and thematically this proves to be a turning point in the poem, and such ‘turns’ have an epiphanic quality in Graham's writing. Here, and, I shall suggest, at many points in his work, an echo of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets can be heard, particularly of ‘East Coker’, and Graham uses the echo to convey the sense that his searches for communication with another and for personal authenticity carry a spiritual resonance, that his poetry is following a mystical path.