Post by shayepoet on Jul 5, 2008 2:57:49 GMT 2
Morning Prayer
Eve Grubin
In Morning Prayer, Eve Grubin pries language open to reveal its pure, muscular core—stripped of the familiar, yet breathing, alive, these are poems that accomplish the work of the body and of the soul. If these pages are seen as prayer, it is prayer of the kind that questions and argues back, prayer that asks only for this world to be known as it is, with its brine-salts, acids, and bitter herbs. In its dazzling assurance of voice and gesture, its ranging investigations, this is one of the finest first collections of recent years.
--Jane Hirshfield
Sample poem:
The Buried Rib Cage
Eve slipped from its arced ridge—
the only body part
you don’t
do evil with:
the eye, the hand,
might beg
corruption;
the ribs are modest
shy crests, ticklish,
an open fan,
not quite sexual, yet not puritan:
delicate accordion
—yawn, moan—
soul breathes through its comb.
tinyurl.com/6yfd3s
Raves and reviews for Morning Prayer:
"Eve Grubin has found "her own wildness" in Morning Prayer, her first book of poetry, and she has also teased a sober knowingness out of our twenty-first century wilderness. Without the slightest grandstanding, this wonderful young poet's old soul is hard at work, sure-eyed and determined to render a lyrical clarity that surprises and penetrates."
--Yusef Komunyakaa
"What is unusual in Morning Prayer, and masterful, is Eve Grubin's ability to hint at a story undisclosed, creating a poetic palimpsest of mystery and revelation. Her interest is in the moments before and after events, in what is known "just before knowledge." With spiritual and artistic discipline she remains within the province of the poem, leading us not through events but through the more treacherous and radiant territory of her response to them."
—Carolyn Forché
"I read Morning Prayer straight through in one sitting -- gripped by the story of one soul wrestling with that angel which breaks as it heals. Here's the world in its fullness: without division: the secular is sacred, the psychological is metaphysical. A miracle. The unspeakable story breaks into song."
--Marie Howe
"The poems in Eve Grubin's Morning Prayer unite a flawless lyrical precision with a mind unafraid of exploring human isolation to its farthest limits. They are at once intimate and vast, at once cryptic and absolutely transparent, and are the testimonies of a poet whose rich sensibility has been perfectly cultivated by experience, insight, and moral imagination."
--Vijay Seshadri
"Eve Grubin is a poet who is after nothing less than a reconciliation between silence and manifestation; her poems seek a nondualist apprehension of reality. This search crosses through all religions and all psychology, but it is rare to find a new vocabulary emerging from the secular and intellectual space that poets inhabit. Still, her poems are open and given freely to every kind of reader. This makes them pleasures."
-- Fanny Howe
"Eve Grubin is a dazzling poet. Such a stir of profound gravity and penetrating wonder fill this majestically contemplative first book -- I am in awe of her words and silences."
--Naomi Shihab Nye
"These poems set out to craft a dark, unsettling music out of the places where doubt and faith, words and silence, love and not-love meet. But these are poems also grounded in the common world, in Brooklyn mornings and Wednesday trains and a radio playing in the background. What unites the particular and the whole are gifts of language and turns of truth which make this a powerful and persuasive first collection."
—Eavan Boland
"In her strong, spare debut, Grubin writes from, and about, her Jewish faith, exploring and justifying it in careful images from modern city life, and in juxtapositions of Jewish liturgy with her own memories of crisis and epiphany...Her most ambitious work gives philosophical and theological propositions a dramatic clarity, even when they explore what she does not know: "Heaven is like unhappiness / on earth only inverted into a finer tone / I am certain of nothing." ...'My transgressions hope I will seek them, ' Grubin speculates in one passionate, long-lined meditation, 'as God wants me to pray.' For all its explorations and doubts, however, Grubin's collection finds a final strength in paradoxical belief, 'living/ inside the laws and the lightning.'"
-- Publishers Weekly
InteReview at La Petite Magazine:
www.lapetitezine.org/Baker.Grubin.htm
About the author:
Eve Grubin’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, La Petite Zine, LIT, Pleiades, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in many places, including Lyric, The Forward, The American Jewish Congress Monthly, Crossroads, modestyzone.net, and in the anthology, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (U of California Press, 2007). Her essay on Jean Valentine is forthcoming in the anthology Let It Be Like Rain. She holds degrees from Smith College, Sarah Lawrence, and The Bread Loaf School of English, and was a fellow at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education (2005-2007) and has studied at Midreshet Rachel v’Chaya College of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. She currently teaches at The New School and the City College of New York, and she is at work on a PhD in English at CUNY's Graduate Center. She is a senior editor at Lyric and the poetry editor at nextbook.org.
-- Interview: tinyurl.com/5r2gyf
-- Interview: tinyurl.com/6h9dlx
-- Essay, "The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore and Politics" (U OF CA PRESS, 2008): tinyurl.com/69jfzv
-- Podcast: tinyurl.com/6jsmym
-- Academic paper on Morning Prayer: tinyurl.com/5ksprp
-- Blog: tinyurl.com/5k6tmg
ISBN-10: 1931357285, ISBN-13: 978-1931357289
Sheep Meadow Press, 96 pages, $12.95
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Amazon: tinyurl.com/5bx8nj
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