Böcker av Grace Schulman

?Without a Claim is a modern Book of Psalms. Indeed, the glory in these radiant sacred songs meld an art of high music with a nuanced love of the world unlike any we've heard before. No matter your mood upon entering this world you'll soon be grateful, and enchanted. In any such house of praise, God herself must be grateful.? ? Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Failure and The God of LonelinessGrace Schulman, who has been called ?a vital and permanent poet? (Harold Bloom), makes new the life she finds in other cultures and in the distant past. In Without a Claim, she masterfully encompasses music, faith, art, and history. The title poem alludes to the Montauk sachem who sold land without any concept of rights to property, and meditates on our own notion of ownership: ?No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn, / cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields, / given the title, never the dominion.? She traces the illusion of rights, from land to objects, from our loves to our very selves. Alternatively, she finds permanence in art, whether in galleries or on cave walls, and in music, whether in the concert hall, on the streets of New York, or in the waves at sea.

One of the finest poets writing today, Grace Schulman finds order in art and nature that enables her to stand fast in a threatened world. The title refers to Itzhak Perlman's performance of a violin concerto with a snapped string, which inspires a celebration of life despite limitations. For her, song imparts endurance: Thelonious Monk evokes Creation; John Coltrane's improvisations embody her own heart's desire to ?get it right on the first take?; the wind plays a harp-shaped oak; and her immigrant ancestors remember their past by singing prayers on a ship bound for New York. In the words of Wallace Shawn, ?When I read her, she makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel that there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it.?

Attesting to Grace Schulman's gifts for her craft, Days of Wonder collects verse spanning nearly three decades, including ten new poems and selections from the poet's four previous collections. Schulman's well-crafted lyrics contain equal portions of reverence and lament, praise and joy. Many of her poems communicate a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world, with references to painters and poets and religion. As William Stafford has written, Schulman "renews our faith in ourselves and in the language we use for finding each other."

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 poetry is often about joy, the celebration of the miraculous, and the birth of beauty from adversity. This book discusses how she became a writer, with influences ranging from her aunt Helen, who leapt from a tower in Poland, to childhood memories of her father reading to her in a foreign language.