The Paintings of Our Lives Poems [Paperback]

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.

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.

POEM ENDING WITH A PHRASE FROM THE PSALMS

Here where loss spins the hickory’s dry leaves, rolls miles under wheels, and bleaches reeds that shone wine-red, I invoke a rose still rising like a choir, past its prime on a spindly bush that bore scarce blooms, as I wake to hear a jay screech like a gate swung open, and see your hand enfolding mine on linen: TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS.

Copyright © 2001 by Grace SchulmanPOEM ENDING WITH A PHRASE FROM THE PSALMS