Eden

by Emily R. Grosholz

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."

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

Reviews

[Daniel Campos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems of childhood amidst a fragile family stitched together by perseverance and care, of love and marriage, of wandering together while longing for a shared home, of motherhood and shared parenthood. Of all the lovely poems, "Commuter Marriage," "Pilgrims," and "Proportions of the Heart" are masterful works of art.