Art, history, and faith are common themes in Grace Schulman’s poetry. Many of her poems are ekphrastic, a style that the title of one of her more recent collections, The Paintings of Our Lives (2001), suggests. Schulman’s history is usually the history of her beloved New York City, where she has lived and worked as a dedicated poetry advocate all her life. Earthly moments and details of city life constantly suggest larger spiritual questions. She names Hopkins, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and Marianne Moore as her influences.
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American Solitude
Hopper never painted this, but here
on a snaky path his vision lingers:
three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces
and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses,
lean forward on a platform, like strangers
with identical frowns scanning a blur,
far off, that might be...