Boat of Letters: Poems

In her much anticipated second full-length collection of poems, Eve Grubin conjures an "inky swamp, wild and warm, / where leaves hang down like muted lamps." Grubin navigates wild waters in a "boat of letters" she constructs, with poems narrating a daughter in mourning for her mother in adulthood's half-light; a wife in the middle of life's existential marathon; a mother raising two children in the terrifying present; an American living in London; a Jewish woman following religious tradition in what can feel like a faithless world. Grubin shapes language and silences into a bridge that holds us between longing and understanding, between effort and the holy ground of that unattainable destination. "The Poetics of Reticence" describes hovering above the waters where "there is no vessel; there are no oars," just the "sounds of a boat creaking," a material contradiction in the hushed void. "Silence is praise: words cannot touch glory," Grubin writes, but she also demonstrates what wonders our speech makes possible. In one poem, the narrator looks back at her wedding and considers how little she knew about marriage, and thinking in the context of her husband's area of expertise, palaeography, she reflects, "I didn't know that when two graphemes join / in a single glyph there is potential for stylistic re-imaginings, / for inventive, elegant variations." All is preordained, she seems to say, while paradoxically, we re-imagine and invent. And even as we create our future, we embrace the beauty of all that we cannot know: "Yesterday, we talked about the shade / of a certain blue mentioned in the Torah. / Was it the blue of our son's lips after a bath? // Or the blue of redemption? // Or the dark blue of the sky / the night we walked across the sands, the seas all around us."