Grace Schulman’s fourth and Tnest 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 identiTes 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.”
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.”
