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Eve Grubin InteReview
by Andrea Baker

Moring Prayer by Eve Grubin
The Sheep Meadow Press, 2005
Reviewed by Andrea Baker

Eve Grubin’s Morning Prayer is comprised of four distinct sections, each written with a generous sincerity and forthrightness that represents the best of what may be meant by the term ‘accessibility.’ The intensity and urgency of Grubin’s voice seeks a true sanity and wills itself into deep witness: “Keep me close to the flaw,/ to the cracked soil/… learning, leaning/ into this difficult field.”

The first section begins, “after a loss you live/ with your gasp. Your gaze// with your hungry mouth as you lift the fork.” The particulars of the loss are unnamed and the story would only be weakened if they had been. Instead, we have a grief unburdened by the details of its narrative, turning with forceful and restless conviction toward the religious laws of a scripturally centered Judaism. Here, stillness seems to be the physical manifest of devotion: “On the Sabbath I stop. The wings still./ The blessed food nourishes/ A wild calm that springs from this new sanity.” This stillness is presented as spiritual nourishment that is real despite a humanity that does not readily embrace it. In Grubin’s work, “It’s not the faith; it’s the faltering… not in peace; toward peace… It’s grieving and praise.”

We are presented with an orthodoxy that doesn’t hesitate to quote the rabbi as Authority and sees religious laws as “a channel./ A space for God,” but also never asks for more than careful attention to the given and flawed presence of life in its world. In “Seduction,” Grubin writes: “God moved, seducing Adam with beautiful/ language into Eden.” Likewise, the beauty, grace, and inherent flaws of language seem to seduce the speaker into religious life. She writes, “word-shiver my shells, my salt/ nearer to you.” The “you” rings as a presence simultaneously Godly and human so it feels only natural that the second section takes on the, at times tumultuous, but always profound dynamics of parent-child relationships.

The speaker now moves fluidly back and forth in time to stand as the parent and the parented. The religious orientation remains but it seems to have, as Grubin would phrase it, “climb[ed] into the underwhisper.” Of her own troubled mother she writes, “the hinge in my mother’s mind split// loose rust// came down like pollen onto my eyelids, my lips.” We feel this as the material proof of restlessness, acknowledged in order to propel even greater conviction toward the sanity that emerges as a more and more prevalent theme even as the relationship of mother and child is shown possessing nearly magical power. When she writes, presumably of her mother, “She kneeled at the hill’s base, stirred/ the new season,// held the scent of cut lawn in her palms,” dutiful love is so powerful that it controls the seasons. In a later poem, the speaker is the maternal force that births even inanimate objects: “Soon I will cry out,/ be born// to the books on the windowsill, to the dust.”

Within the context of these mythically scaled bonds we also locate a kindness, prepared for the flexibility required to maintain the greatest strength. She names this balance “Sanity” then defines it: “Supple as the bridge’s frame is soft built to bend.” Locating these dynamics again in the mother child relationship, she continues, “When the mother restrains a wrestling child/ she grips the child close// to stop a fall still// she allows/ a softness in her limbs.”

In the third section, we move to a subject matter that is at once religious and erotic. In the opening poem, “Desire,” Grubin writes, “God unpoured the wine out of Eve and the birds began yearning.// A woman desires her husband as the rain wants the earth/ to need it.” Desire is forceful and captures a religious longing, but this same willfulness is also shown to be without power: “What I want will not come to me just because I desire it./ I have been told that I cannot force.// I don’t know how this will end.” It’s in the openness to contradictory drives that we feel the supple strength that was earlier evoked. Among the highlights of this section are two poems that pine for the purely receptive femininity of the nineteenth-century novel: “Sometimes I just want to give in, become/ the heroine in a great nineteenth-century novel, an earnest and suffering young woman.” While Grubin’s twenty-first-century voice is far from lacking in either earnestness or suffering, the historical vision is one without the power to overcome and given to acting out its suffering: “I want-in my white nightgown-/ to unlatch the shutter, throw/ open the window,/ cry out into the rain.” Of course, those grand gestures stay rooted in history and Grubin seems to recommit herself to witness as she aligns herself with the current natural world where, “Every crisis emits seeds/ as when a poppy unwraps in a windy field.// The seeds are gifts, opening into risk.”

Finally, in the last section we see this gift held open and risking even more than it has up to this point as Grubin asks pragmatic questions about how to reach an empowered femininity: “How can a woman find her own wildness?/ Where is it? What is woman? Non-man?/ Soft dress, long braided hair, non-football, non-president?” Further down the page she makes another declaration of her faith in sanity:
             
        What is a wild woman? If you shave
        Your head, are you wild? Is rebellion wild?
        What does it mean to be fearless?
        Are tattoos wild? Being a senator? A poet?
        Who is wild? Is she wild? What about
        Her? Or her?

Grubin’s questions are fantastically compelling for both their rejection of the crazed-poet stereotype and their eagerness to locate sanity as wild freedom. This poem stands out as nearly a manifesto, but it is a manifesto of questions that seem to be the cause of the final poems, which become more fragmentary and, at times, even lightly surreal, such as in “Prayer Mouth, New York City,” where she writes, “The electric animals are standing// on their hind legs in the mains, sobbing,/ walking like humans.” Though many poems like “Jerusalem III” continue to present themselves nearly as prayers, “Let’s praise/ even those who, for now, lean/ on the hinge,” the poems become less grouped by subject matter and are populated by rabbi as well as secular literary figures like Huck Finn, Gatsby, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot.

I was drawn to write about Morning Prayer after having read that it received most of its attention from Jewish periodicals rather than from the literary world. While it seems a great gift to bring such well-crafted poems to the Jewish community, there is nothing that should limit it to that world. It’s a fine collection that stands on its own merit, and, in the best of all possible senses, represents a voice that has negotiated the world with faith in the particularities of its own perceptions. It deserves wider recognition.

INTERVIEW WITH EVE GRUBIN (click for next section)

Eve Grubin's book of poems, Morning Prayer, was published by The Sheep Meadow Press in December of 2005. She teaches poetry at The New School and City College, where she is also the Marvin and Edward Kaplan Lecturer in Jewish Studies. Her essay, "After Eden: The Veil as a Conduit to the Internal," will appear in The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Folklore, and Politics (U. of CA Press, 2007). Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a fellow at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education.

Andrea Baker was the recipient of the 2004 Slope Editions Book Prize for her first book, like wind loves a window. She is also the author of the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and gather (moneyshoteditions, 2006). She maintains a blog at andreabaker.blogspot.com.