Eden (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Grosholz, Professor Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801843898 ISBN 13: 9780801843891

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992

Synopsis

In her third book of poetry Emily Grosholz brings together forty lyric, narrative, and epistolary poems that trace a pilgrimage from the Eden of childhood through alienation and loss to an earthly paradise regained as the poet establishes her own family and a new sense of the purposes of her art. The route traverses Detroit in the early twenties, Paris and Washington, D.C., in the early seventies, Athens and Toronto in the mid-eighties, yesterday's Thimphu and Cassis. But it always returns to the poet's heartland, Philadelphia and the back country of Pennsylvania and New York. Punctuated by meditations on solitude and death, the poems come full circle to the pleasures of marriage, of friends and children, of creation. To her husband, the poet writes, "However often now our woven/ lives converge and separate, my love,/ today we've come this far." And to her son, "With you fast in my arms,/ I'm back again in the heart's Italy."

About this title

Reviews

"Part of the world persists/ distinct from what we say, but part will stay/ only if we keep talking: only speech/ can re-create the gardens of the world." Gardens, both lived in and visited, can be expected to dominate a collection called Eden. Describing life through gardens, views from windows, and conversation, Grosholz puts herself in a tradition of women's poetry that defies current trends. Her poems are contemplative and philosophical, but in ways that can evoke a class-bound tradition of female solitude and leisure. Writing about the rare and evanescent, she can sometimes sound precious. Nonetheless, there is enchantment to be found in the detail with which Grosholz talks about the elusive parts of her world. For general collections.
- Rob Schmieder, Boston
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801843898
• ISBN 13: 9780801843891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112