Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022 by Grace Shulman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022 by Grace Shulman
• Hilary Sideris (bio)

again, the dawn: new and selected poems, 1976–2022 Grace Shulman
Turtle Point Press
https://www.turtlepointpress.com/books/again-the-dawn-new-and-selected-poems-1976-2022/
280 pages; Print, $22.00

Grace Shulman, master of many poetic forms and beloved poet-citizen of New York City, has published a second volume of selected poems, Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022. Her earlier collection of selected poems, Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2002. Shulman's poems go well beyond personal narrative to encompass a range of human experience and thought. They allude to cultural figures and artists as well as humbler folk from the past. David Mason described her as a poet attuned to the past, "hearing footsteps and looking under her own soles to see what is there," feeling the vibrations of other times and people. But Shulman does not shrink from autobiography, and her poems often grapple with intense pain and grief.

"Without a Claim," the title poem from Shulman's 2013 collection, ponders the fallacy of human ownership of the natural world through the lens of the American immigrant experience. The poem recounts the poet's uncomprehending experience of becoming a landowner. "I couldn't take it in," Shulman writes,

when told I owned this land with oaks and maplesscattered like crowds on Sundays, and an undergroundstrung not with pipes but snaky roots that writhed

when my husband sank a rhododendron,now flaunting pinks high as an attic window.The land we call our place was never ours.

The waves of immigrants who arrived in New York after its "discovery" by Europeans, the poet's ancestors among them, came from places where they had nothing, in the hope of having something to call their own. Yet the land's [End Page 132] truest owners, the Montauks, were the only ones able to understand that it wasn't even theirs:

If it belonged to anyone, it wasthe Montauk chief who traded it for mirrors,knowing it wasn't his. Not the sailors

who brought the blacksmith iron, nor the farmerswho dried salt hay, nor even the later locals,whale hunters, the harpooner from Sumatra,

the cook from Borneo, who like my ancestorswandered from town to port without a claim,their names inside me though not in the registries.

No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn,cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields,given the title, never the dominion.

The poems in this collection often explore the past through the sounds and meanings of names. "Headstones" celebrates the sounds of Montauk names like Poniut and Sassakato, names that had "vowels / like gulls' cries." In the Montauk chief Wyandanch's "nameless grave," diggers found strung clamshells, "wampum," a symbol of his power. There's a yacht club there now, Shulman tells us, where she once dined:

I drove past roads with names of English counties,Norfolk and Kent, then found a seaside table.

Wyandanch would not have been invited,nor would my grandfather Dave, much lessmy ancestor Schmuel, but there I was,staring at shell toss, hearing breakers roar:

Wyandanch and Quashashem, his daughter,her name the sound of seawater through stones,snapped shells their monument, their living marker.

In contrast to the "headstones" of the yacht club, the "gazing photos, / racing trophies" of Anglo members who would have shunned a Jewish family, [End Page 133] the headstones Shulman gazes at are small, wave-swept whelks and rocks in whose music she can hear the names of both her ancestor Schmuel and Wyandanch's daughter, Quashashem. Beyond story and history, the poem is an ode to languages lost, drowned out by the English vowels and consonants that continue to dominate the monolingual American landscape.

Again, the Dawn includes a dazzling ghazal that first appeared in Agha Shahid Ali's 2000 anthology, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. The anthology prompted a ghazal craze in English that, happily, has yet to die down. Shulman's ghazal, "Prayer," repeats the phrase "in Jerusalem," an expression used by...