Description

Grace Schulman's fourth collection of poetry, THE PAINTINGS OF OUR LIVES, celebrates earthly things while discovering inner lives. Here are poems of love and marriage -- including a psalm for the poet's anniversary and a portrayal of her parents dancing during the Depression -- and poems identifying with the hungers, sorrows, and joys of Chaim Soutine, Margaret Fuller, Paul Celan, and Henry James. In the final sonnet sequence, Schulman confronts her mother's death, calling on the art of many cultures to illuminate the universality of grief.

About the author(s)

GRACE SCHULMAN is the author many acclaimed books of poetry, including Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. For her poetry she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Aiken-Taylor Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and three Pushcart prizes. Schulman is a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She is a former director of the Poetry Center (1978–1984) and a former poetry editor of The Nation (1971–2006).

Reviews

“These elegiac lyrics are reveries upon art, street scenes, and the beloved dead. Many of them are so exquisite in their sensibility, so intricate in their texture, that they are likely to endure as long as we have discerning readers.” -- Harold Bloom

"Delicacy of mind and ear, and gentleness of spirit, emerge together with quiet assurance in these new poems by Grace Schulman and give them their elegance, authenticity, and spirit. These are poems whose deeply informed humanity allows us to use that word with hope." -- W.S. Merwin —

More Poetry

More American

More African American & Black