Poet Grace Schulman will be at the Amagansett Free Library at 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 3, to read from her memoir, “Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage.” The book is dedicated to the memory of her late husband Jerome L. Schulman who died at the age of 89 in 2016.
Her latest book, “Mourning Songs: Poems on Sorrow and Beauty,” published by New Directions in May, is a collection of some of her favorite poems by Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, W. S. Merwin, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Robert Frost—and many others.
“The poems in this collection,” as Schulman notes in her introduction, “sing of grief as they praise life. As any bereaved survivor knows, there is no consolation. ‘Time doesn’t heal grief; it emphasizes it’ wrote Marianne Moore. The loss of a loved one never leaves us. We don’t want it to. In grief, one remembers the beloved. But running beside it, parallel to it, is the joy of existence, the love that causes pain of loss, the loss that enlarges us with the wonder of existence.”
Ms. Schulman was recently elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters in the field of literature. A recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, the highest award of the Poetry Society of America, Ms. Schulman has served as director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, the poetry editor of the Nation and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College. She resides in Manhattan and Springs.
Staff Writer on Jul 22, 2019