Search results for ""author grace schulman""

Who has not suffered grief? In Mourning Songs, the brilliant poet and editor Grace Schulman has gathered together the most moving poems about sorrow by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Neruda, Catullus, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, W. S. Merwin, Lorca, Denise Levertov, Keats, Hart Crane, Michael Palmer, Robert Frost, Hopkins, Hardy, Bei Dao, and Czeslaw Milosz—to name only some of the masters in this slim volume. “The poems in this collection,” as Schulman notes in her introduction, “sing of grief as they praise life.” She notes, “As any bereaved survivor knows, there is no consolation. ‘Time doesn’t heal grief; it emphasizes it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. The loss of a loved one never leaves us. We don’t want it to. In grief, one remembers the beloved. But running beside it, parallel to it, is the joy of existence, the love that causes pain of loss, the loss that enlarges us with the wonder of existence.”

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A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "The Marble Bed is a vision; it is an ode to life."—Rowan Ricardo Phillips "Each poem in The Marble Bed journeys far, wandering the territory of love's psyche."—Yusef Komunyakaa "One of the permanent poets of her generation."—Harold Bloom Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret's wing; Coltrane's ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor's arc; a rainbow's painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: "Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I'll have to praise it."

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A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "Grace Schulman makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it."—Wallace Shawn Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and the author of seven collections of poems. She has had long posts as Poetry Editor of the Nation magazine, Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, where she still teaches. But her love for her scientist husband and her care for him through his long illness proved to be among her greatest inspirations. It called forth her deepest grief at his loss. How did Schulman maintain the independence, solitude, and freedom she required within the bounds of marriage? And what made her marriage endure through a decade of living apart? “In my experience, the phrase ‘happy marriage’ is a term of opposites, like ‘friendly fire’ or ‘famous poet.’ My marriage has been a feast of contradiction . . . ” Strange Paradise looks at this, Schulman’s remarkable career, her friendships with great writers, her work as an historic impresario at the Y, her religious and philosophical leanings, and her grand love affair with New York—all in her magical prose.

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In this generous selection, Grace Schulman moves from 'the altering light' of earthly experience to the possibility of the miraculous.In the celebrated love poem 'The Present Perfect,' she sees 'wildflowers / poking through gravel cracks in our neighbors' driveway / slender but fortunate, built to last their day,' and stanzas about an El Greco painting close with 'one beam that God devised, before the / sun, would have shown us the world in one glance.' Schulman's work so far evolves from a vision of unity expressed in her first collection, BURN DOWN THE ICONS.Her second book, HEMISPHERES, opens with a beautiful blessing, and 'has that first requisite of poetry - the world comes alive in the work ...There is nothing familiar about this poet's genius' (New York Times Book Review).The selections from FOR THAT DAY ONLY contain vivid scenes of New York in the tradition of Whitman, Crane, and Moore.THE PAINTINGS OF OUR LIVES, Schulman's most recent book, includes a sonnet sequence that calls on the art of many cultures to illuminate the universality of grief.The ten new poems that complete this breathtaking volume attest to this poet's gifts for her craft and for the expression of praise.

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