Description
A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection
"The Marble Bed is a vision; it is an ode to life."-Rowan Ricardo Phillips
"Each poem in The Marble Bed journeys far, wandering the territory of love's psyche."
-Yusef Komunyakaa
"One of the permanent poets of her generation."-Harold Bloom
Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret's wing; Coltrane's ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor's arc; a rainbow's painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: "Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I'll have to praise it."
About the Author
Grace Schulman, winner of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of eight collections of poems and of a memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage. Formerly Poetry Editor of the Nation and Director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, she is Distinguished Professor of CUNY's Baruch College.
Reviews
REVIEWS
"Grace Schulman's precise, evocative descriptions feel simultaneously valedictory and vividly present: an affirmation of the world even in the midst of the pain that it brings." -The Hudson Review
"Schulman's work has a dignified, sculptural grace that counterpoints the inner noise and agitation many of us bear. To read her is to come off a busy city street into a cathedral nave, to be still, or to walk quietly along the edge of the evening sea." -Literary Matters
"A gorgeous non-compliance with the world's tendency to proceed toward its own demise."-Ron Slate, On the Seawall
"Read this collection if you have grieved. . . . Read it if you want to be restored to the world around you. . . . Read it, then look up, breathe in, raise your hands, and let Grace Schulman assure you: I'll be there, / gazing impiously-unless / that is what sacred is, the work, the looking up, / the wonder."-Julie Sheehan, East Hampton Star
PRAISE FOR THE MARBLE BED
"Grace Schulman is a national treasure. This sumptuous array of splendid, hard-won poems feels in its essence like one poem, one surging grace note that sings out not only across years and oceans, but also across the great divide that separates the living from the dead and the knowable from the unknowable."-Rowan Ricardo Phillips
"The Marble Bed is magnificent. I am swept away by its trajectory and the luminescence of each poem. What a gift to the world this collection is."-Elise Paschen
"The Marble Bed is beautiful in conception and execution, a marvel of vision and passion. From early Montauk to the pandemic, Italian angels of "sex and death" to visions of ascension on Fifth Avenue, Grace Schulman seeks and finds tranquility in blizzards, the price of silk, love in all its endless grief and convolutions."-Philip Schultz
"Grace Schulman's The Marble Bed confronts life and death matters. Here's a lyrical journey paced by sonnets that create a totalizing effect, with the surprise of jazz between tropes. This poet knows when, where, and what to leave out of lyrical portraits so the reader also helps to create meaning. We see and feel into the truth."-Yusef Komunyakaa
"In this profound, elegiac new volume, Grace Schulman seeks to immortalize as if in marble the sustaining power of love. . . . Schulman is our poet of, yes, grace, of elegance, and sorrow, of poems born out of the chiseled stone of reflection as they yearn and achieve transcendence."-Jill Bialosky
"Grace Schulman's poems never forget we are all specks in the universe and sparkle only for a time. Her style is unruffled and her tone is controlled, but love and grief haunt the clarity of her mind."-Henri Cole
"Grace Schulman's timely poems are born of disjunctures-a 21st century pandemic, the early 17th century colonization of Montauk, New York. In the voice of a caregiver or widow, traveler or gardener, she brings forth ghosts out of the wind-driven detritus of Manhattan, and eloquently summons tomb sculptures from Italy, easily traveling zones, cities, worlds: time."-Sophie Cabot Black
PRAISE FOR GRACE SCHULMAN
"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."-Wallace Shawn
"Schulman is a torch."-Richard Howard
"Delicacy of mind and ear, and gentleness of spirit, emerge together with quiet assurance in these poems and give them their authority and pose, their elegance, authenticity and spirit. These are poems whose deeply informed humanity allows us to use that word with hope."-W. S. Merwin
"These poems are made of fire and wind, they shimmer in risk, in raw beauty and music. These poems hold no illusions about demarcations and signed over 'rights'- the permanence they offer lies in the shape of poetry as pure art, unpossessed."-Carol Muske Dukes
"A vital and permanent poet."-Harold Bloom
"There is nothing familiar about this poet's genius; that is its burden, and its immeasurable gift."-The New York Times Book Review
Awards
Winner of Induction as Member 2019 (United States) and Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry 1996 (United States) and Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry 2016 (United States) and Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry 2002 (United States).
Book Information
ISBN 9781885983831
Author Grace Schulman
Format Paperback
Page Count 136
Imprint Turtle Point Press
Publisher Turtle Point Press
