The Paintings of Our Lives: Poems

by Grace Schulman

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.”

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

First published February 13, 2001

About the author

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).

Reviews

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the ekphrastic poems best, but they all really conjured a cohesive world very different than my own that was interesting to immerse in

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some ekphrastic poems.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a strange book, one I grabbed mostly at random from the library shelf.

It's very old school, mostly formally-influenced poems that are largely ekphrastic in a sort of traditional way. In other words, not totally my thing. But there's a level of craft here that is admirable, and there's something behinf these poems-- it's a long sequence given over to mourning the mother, explicitly and less clearly, and I don't mean to diminish the effort or grace with which that task is undertaken. It's just not quite the kind of lyrical work I read most often, because it's what I enjoy most.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mainly a book of ekphrastic poems. The writer so wants to be an artist, even with words, and that is what comes through in poem after poem, her thwarted desire. The frustrated desire overwhelms whatever emotion the writer intended to put into the poem and it is all we are left with. The poems are thus over-crafted, and they struggle and buck instead of rise.

EXCEPT for the last series of poems about the death of the author's mother. Thank Grace for that series.