Although he has not reprinted all his early poems – there are a fair number omitted from Cage Without Grievance and 2ND Poems, and The Seven Journeys is not represented at all – the uncompromising chronological arrangement of his ‘Collected’ presents Graham's readers with a dense initial verbal blast or barrage redolent of the whole heady iconolatry of the 1940s, and they must persist through these vatic voluntaries until they reach the clearer air of The White Threshold (1949), The Nightfishing (1955), and the later work of the 1970s. In the early poems, the word is king but meaning is not; and yet, as in the similar poetry of Dylan Thomas, there are frequent lines which stand out and refuse to be forgotten:

or

or

or

– the last of these in a poem unfortunately omitted from the Collected Poems. In an essay published in this early period, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (Poetry Scotland, No. 3, July 1946), Graham wrote:

He did not escape the obvious dangers lurking in that view, the overtaking of sense by sound, the over-estimation of subconscious and chance elements, the frustrating of argument and persuasion.