Paintings of Our Lives : Poems

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 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).

POEM ENDING WITH A PHRASE FROM THE PSALMSHere 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

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Excerpted from The Paintings of Our Lives: Poems by Grace Schulman
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