The Marble Bed

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.”

• "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