Reviewed by: The Marble Bed by Grace Schulman Helane Levine-Keating (bio) the marble bed Grace Schulman Turtle Point Press https://www.turtlepointpress.com/books/the-marble-bed/ 136 pages; Print, $18.00 A much respected and familiar figure in the American poetry community for decades, especially in New York, Grace Schulman served as poetry editor of The Nation from 1972 to 2006 as well as the director of Manhattan's iconic 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. While at the Unterberg Center, she oversaw and introduced readings by such esteemed poets as Ted Hughes, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, and Octavio Paz, as well as initiating the annual "Discovery Poetry Contest" for poets who have yet to publish full-length collections. A distinguished professor of CUNY's Baruch College, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Frost Medalist for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, Schulman is also the author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which, The Marble Bed, appeared in 2020. Running like an underground stream through The Marble Bed's stunning sixty-five poems in eight sections are the themes of long love lost, memory and grief and finality, and the jazz-inflected difficult upward climb toward renewal. These poems, often featuring fragile new possibilities in the wake of the death of a beloved husband after more than half a century of marriage, are elegies linking what has so recently been present and vital to what remains, just as in the introductory poem, "Orchid," a fuchsia moth orchid salvaged from a garbage bin becomes a symbolic opportunity to nurse a tenuous life back to vibrancy as the poet waters it and "strokes the crooked stem // that darts out to reveal wings whose vermilion, / burning against a window facing brick, / defies endings on this cold year's end." In "Happiness," ironically described as "a field of fireflies / that blink on-off-on" echoed three stanzas later by "the life together, / apart, together, / the long marriage, / oxymoronic // in its dank joy," the speaker declares "I choose [End Page 104] you" and "I take you" despite all this relationship's fluctuations, much as in the next poem, "The Sand Dancers," a faded youthful photograph revisits the previous depiction of life's vicissitudes in its question "how could they know the years would bring / losses, wars, together, apart, together?" Elegy and memory further comingle in "Fragments of a Marriage," which opens with "Fifty-seven years" and closes with the couplet "The finished painting that I knew / we'd never own when you lay perfect, complete," while "The Rooted Bed" poignantly depicts the husband's hand-hewn platform bed, reminiscent of Odysseus's, where "The bed is still in place" despite the husband's absence, though the speaker here feels it "quiver to put down new roots." How do we reconcile such loss but to accept, as this poet does, the existential sense of mutability in the closing lines of "Meteor," the last poem in this first section: "Nothing is new. / Nothing alive cannot be altered"? Moving from personal to collective loss in "Gone," the initial poem in The Marble Bed's second section, we are now looking through a Manhattan window at a Washington Square devoid of people due to the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The opening lines' enjambment, "From my window, I see the world / without us in it," quickly turns presence into absence, while in the fourth stanza the horrific daily news of COVID-19 victims forced to die alone without their loved ones surrounding them reverberates with its allusion to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland: Around us, death: the numbers spin the mind.Fever dreams. The last breath held, alone.I hadn't known death had undone so many. Still, despite the scene's muteness, a sudden "mournful, prayerful sax / … unlooses notes / calls me to the window, and I hear / the sounds I can't imagine days without," as Schulman introduces into this ghostly scene the unexpected solace of human-made music. Similarly, "Because" conjures up the small hopeful signs of life despite "a wounded universe...
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Feb 17, 2023
Avanish Bhai Patel 
Open Access