The Broken String
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning contemporary poet celebrates the joyful, impossible language of music in this collection that "surpasses her distinguished previous work" (Harold Bloom).
One of the finest poets writing today, Grace Schulman finds order in art and nature that enables her to stand fast in a threatened world. The title refers to Itzhak Perlman's performance of a violin concerto with a snapped string, which inspires a celebration of life despite limitations. For her, song imparts endurance: Thelonious Monk evokes Creation; John Coltrane's improvisations embody her own heart's desire to "get it right on the first take"; the wind plays a harp-shaped oak; and her immigrant ancestors remember their past by singing prayers on a ship bound for New York. In the words of Wallace Shawn, "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."
"Grace Shulman has developed into one of the permanent poets of her generation." —Harold Bloom
"[An] extended paean to the triumph of art over adversity or, perhaps, to the birth of beauty in adversity." —The Seattle Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schulman's sixth outing goes all-out in attempting to represent joy: the kind that comes from works of art, in classical music, in jazz or on canvas, and the kind that comes from attention to everyday details. In the opening title poem, in which the violinist Itzhak Perlman advises (in Schulman's paraphrase): "make music with all you have, and find/ a newer music with what you have left." Other artists, other moments, provoke less optimistic thoughts: Masaccio's Adam and Eve, like Schulman with her former friend or lover, expresses "the long vibrato/ of sacred rage"; the painter Chaim Soutine, known for depicting carcasses, finds "light/ and the heart of dread." Schulman (Days of Wonder) sounds most convincing when her palette grows darker: "Death" belies its stark title by presenting, in dense five-line stanzas, many cultures' ceremonies of mourning, from the Jewish "Kaddish that sanctifies and praises being" to a New Orleans brass-band funeral. Here, even more than in prior collections, Schulman seeks and finds a fluency in traditional forms: trimeter quatrains here and there, but by and large a supple, unforced pentameter, whether rhymed, off-rhymed or blank. Detractors may find the new work offers few surprises; admirers may find much to praise.
