That night the wind-chapped table shouted, newpeaches, bread, still warm, and consecratedby watery breezes on the shoreof a town whose very name, Springs,was a carillon that jangled newness.Talking of ancient ruins with my new friends,I allowed the wind to rinse regrets,lights winking miles across the bay,noiseless, but for the surge of waves,altar-white, before my feet in sand.And when we turned off lanterns to look skywardfor the Perseids (it was meteor season),a comet rode queenly across the skybefore it curved and fell. Seeing myselfa speck in the firmament, I rememberedthat rock may burn suddenly, blaze into flameand spin for centuries before it shineswanting to be remade. Gray rock. The samethat sparkles with mica flecks by daywhen breakers slap it clean. Nothing is new.Nothing alive cannot be altered.
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“Meteor” from AGAIN, THE DAWN by Grace Schulman.
Published by Turtle Point Press on November 15, 2022.
Copyright © 2023 by Grace Schulman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Grace Schulman was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and was awarded the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, presented by the Poetry Society of America, in 2016. Her seventh collection of poems, Without a Claim, appeared in 2013 from Mariner Books. For her sixth collection, The Broken String, she won praise from Peter Makuck in The Hudson Review for her “sacramental vision” and from Wallace Shawn for seeing a “sharp, undeniable glimmering of beauty.” She is the author of Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin), which was selected by Library Journal as one of the “best poetry books” of 2002, and was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award of that year; and The Paintings of Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin), a selection of the Academy of American Poets’ Book Club.
Schulman’s memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (Turtle Point Press, 2018). Her book of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures, came out in 2010 (U. of Michigan Press). Among her honors are the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Council on the Arts. Her poems have won five Pushcart Prizes, and have appeared in The Best American Poetry. Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking, 2003), she is translator from the Hebrew of T. Carmi’s At the Stone of Losses; and co-translator from the Spanish of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Songs of Cifar. Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1974-84, and former poetry editor of The Nation, 1971-2006.
Schulman, who received her Ph.D. from New York University, has taught poetry writing at Princeton, Columbia, Bennington, and Warren Wilson. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the New Republic, Paris Review, the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic, among other journals. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals, here and abroad.
Exquisite new work along with a selection of her finest poems spanning five decades from the essential poet and national treasure, Frost Medal winner Grace Schulman.
Again, the Dawn draws together poems from eight books plus a generous selection of new poems. In them, Grace Schulman hears the call to praise tempered by stark details of city life such as trumpets that blare “louder than street sirens.” and iron fences / handwrought with lyres, Greek frets, acanthus leaves.” Schulman brings passion and intelligence to bear on occasions she ponders, whether historical or contemporary. In joy and in grief, she gazes at the light and sees the majesty in ordinary things. This collection ranges across decades of prize-winning books, and yet, as its title exclaims, the poetry of Grace Schulman is as new as the rising sun. As Julie Sheehan has written of her most recent volume, “Read this collection if you, too, have grieved. Read it if you need your own guide to the underworld. Read it if you've ever felt proud to get at the meaning of poems, of art, of music. Read it if you want to be restored to the world around you, if late-stage capitalism or imperialism or politics have numbed you. Read it, then look up, breathe in, raise your own 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.’”
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