Brushes With Poetry

"Before the hour I cried, 'Let there be light!'/I tossed out some three hundred early versions./Revisions help. What clatter in the firmament,/though, when mountains fell, stars fizzled out," intones a God with both an authorial work ethic and a puckish sense of humor in Grace Schulman's The Paintings of Our Lives. And we've seen that authorial wink before: In this, the Nation poetry editor's fourth collection, she carries on with concerns we first noted in For That Day Only, Hemispheres and Burn Down the Icons.

Schulman writes a personal poetry that is both warm and clever; religion seems to float in as lightly as a chorale in the background, when it isn't coloring our lives outright: "Through leaded windowpanes, the light pours down/less on the holy figures than on objects/waiting to be used, that tell the story: a fringed towel hung askew, a kettle-laver,//unlit wall sconces, the windblown pages/of a book laid open on a table," she writes in the title poem. "Somewhere are the paintings of our lives,/invisible to us," she continues; the search for that underlying canvas permeates much of Schulman's work. (The poem is based on a triptych of the annunciation by Flemish master Robert Campin; many of Schulman's poems are based on or make reference to a historical context, object or event--e.g., "Henry James Revisiting, 1904"--in the process creating a tension between the reader's expectation and the poet's play with the concept. (One of her favorite techniques is to juxtapose historical context and modern detail for effect: In "Balm in Gilead" we move from Jeremiah to the traditional black spiritual to the underside of the California condor, "once thought doomed,/now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.") Schulman's poems are learned and serious--the transom of death and the transcendence of delight in the physical are among her major concerns--but she is a poet of joy verging on prankish as well, speaking to us tongue in cheek, often as not. Schulman closes the book with a series of fifteen sonnets about the death of her mother. The book's last words: "Praise life."

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