From Library Journal
Poetry readers fond of New York City will be drawn to the work of Schulman (The Paintings of Our Lives). A widely published poet and critic, professor of English at Baruch College, poetry editor of the Nation, and former director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, Schulman is a native New Yorker acutely conscious of the layers of history that haunt her beloved neighborhoods. A ballad about an immigrant grandfather's home turf on the Lower East Side also touches upon Walt Whitman's expeditions to a synagogue there and Henry James's excursions in the West Village ("Footsteps on Lower Broadway"). A more recent sonnet sequence is a melancholy tribute to the poet's deceased mother, whose possessions from jewelry to a piano signify a vanishing world whose relics sadly encumber the present. Art and faith are Schulman's favorite themes, and many of these poems are inspired by paintings. But what is particularly engaging here is a calm lack of pretension, a poetry that wants to trade egotism for joy. Consisting mainly of selections from her four previous volumes, this is an attractive collection and a good introduction to the poet. Ellen Kaufman, New York CityCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The color blue at its most lustrous is everywhere present in Schulman's melodiously beautiful poems. Blue is the sky, music, and all that is sublime; it's shadows and sorrow, too. Schulman writes with poise, precision, and quiet delight in the everyday splendors of life: a bird's flight, a sunset, a longtime companion, a lighted window. She is in awe, too, of the compulsion to create and pays insightful tribute to those who are driven hard by their muse, like the painters Soutine and Turner. She writes of nature wild and in the maze of the city with a painter's eye and the reverence of the faithful, and she contemplates holiness with her incisive intelligence and playfulness intact. Schulman remembers her father's voice of "trumpets and bells," which she has inherited, at least on the page. And she mourns her mother with a sense of deep connectedness to all who have mourned before her. That's Schulman's gift, her adroitness in lacing the personal into the fabric of the cosmic. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"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


Book Description
Grace Schulman"s fourth and Þnest collection, THE PAINTINGS OF OUR LIVES, celebrates earthly things while discovering inner lives. As THE NEW YORKER wrote of her previous book, "Schulman"s beautiful poems are deft and intimate without ever becoming confessional." Here are poems of love and marriage, including a psalm for the poet"s anniversary and a portrayal of her parents dancing in the Depression. Moving outward, Schulman identiÞes with the hungers, sorrows, and joys of Chaim Soutine, Margaret Fuller, Paul Celan, and Henry James. "Prayer," a Yom Kippur ghazal, is a vision of the unity of warring people. The title poem embodies the perception that life"s events, though seemingly random, have an order akin to an unseen painting. In a remarkable sonnet sequence, which Marilyn Hacker has praised as "an elegiac masterpiece," Schulman confronts her mother"s death by considering the rites of many cultures, including ancient ritual objects we cherish as art. She regards such concern in light of the Netherlandish painters, who gave "more life to violets, their "thisness" caught."


About the Author
Grace Schulman has received the Delmore Schwartz Award for Poetry and a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, poetry editor of The Nation, and a former director of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
POEM ENDING WITH A PHRASE FROM THE PSALMSHere where loss spins the hickory"s dry leaves,rolls miles under wheels, and bleaches reedsthat shone wine-red, I invoke a rosestill rising like a choir, past its primeon a spindly bush that bore scarce blooms,as I wake to hear a jay screech like a gateswung open, and see your hand enfolding mineon linen: TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS.Copyright © 2001 by Grace Schulman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Poetry readers fond of New York City will be drawn to the work of Schulman (The Paintings of Our Lives). A widely published poet and critic, professor of English at Baruch College, poetry editor of the Nation, and former director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, Schulman is a native New Yorker acutely conscious of the layers of history that haunt her beloved neighborhoods. A ballad about an immigrant grandfather's home turf on the Lower East Side also touches upon Walt Whitman's expeditions to a synagogue there and Henry James's excursions in the West Village ("Footsteps on Lower Broadway"). A more recent sonnet sequence is a melancholy tribute to the poet's deceased mother, whose possessions from jewelry to a piano signify a vanishing world whose relics sadly encumber the present. Art and faith are Schulman's favorite themes, and many of these poems are inspired by paintings. But what is particularly engaging here is a calm lack of pretension, a poetry that wants to trade egotism for joy. Consisting mainly of selections from her four previous volumes, this is an attractive collection and a good introduction to the poet. Ellen Kaufman, New York City Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Schulman's fourth volume is a collection of elegies and prayers, whose last note is an injunction, overheard rather than delivered: "Praise life." But most of these poems are works of remembrance, and often grief; they concern lonely stretches of road, dead mothers, and heroines lost at sea. The need to rhapsodize apparently comes later, when the ghosts are, if not quite laid to rest, at least faced for what they are. Schulman writes a graceful line, with such subtle shifts of syntax and direction that only after eight lines of muffled pentameter (in "Poem Ending with a Phrase from the Psalms") do you realize that the whole affair is a single sentence. Her rhymes, sparingly employed, can be so understated that they nearly merge with the meter, eschewing the hammer blows of emphasis: in "Carnegie Hill Birdlore," she links "wake" with "mosaic," and "icons" with "stones," all of which takes a fine chisel. Though she does not strike too many classicist notes, Schulman is comfortable with the formal devices she selects, which include a powerful sonnet sequence about her mother's death and her own attempt to see that life as it was, in detail. Schulman's other large theme is New York, a city that presents itself to her in ancient dress, a kind of Rome for the New World. Whitman and Crane necessarily loom like skyscrapers in the background, but Schulman's treatment is deflationary: it avoids cosmic allegories in favor of the personal and historical. In "Brooklyn Bridge," the poet meets "a vision of my grandmother in 1920, / belled skirt, braided red hair. She slithers under her stalled Ford and out again, tarred black, then cranks the engine." Schulman's range of tone is notwide-itruns from somber to meditative-and does not dare too much, but in its limited sphere her golden bowl is flawless.