Paula Goldman

Late Love Paula Goldman

In so many ways, these terrific poems are, as she says in one poem, "the grasp of the sea / close and eager, the sun / a Monet / painting." And that skillful grasp, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, holds us securely and initiates a dialogue with artists, writers, mythic and literary characters like Othello and Aphrodite, and the poet's personal memory. With poems like "The Girl in the Stone Creek Coffee Shop" after Ezra Pound, we can experience not simple influence but creative extension, much like a jazz artist riffing off a standard, and with poems like "Van Gogh's Prayer" we enter into the amazing convergence of two hearts ("Let the crows fly from my heart," the poem begins), the artist and the poet. This is a world as changeable as that sea she attempts to grasp. What we have, in sum, is a wonderful account of "how we ate, how we thrived. How / the blood flowed into our lives."

-Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Out of Place, and winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH, Witter Bynner, AWP's George Garrett awards.

"To see the light, one has to see the dark," Goldman says in "Golden Autumn." And indeed, to appreciate the high art of literature and painting, one has to encounter the daily human existence art both heightens and transcends. In these elegant and intelligent poems, the quotidian collides with the highbrow in unpredictable ways that allow us to see both worlds with fresh eyes. It is a fine book filled with yearning, restlessness, acceptance, and hope all folded into one rich batter. I recommend it.

-Mark Cox, author of Sorrow Bread and Readiness

Paula Goldman's poised and mesmerizing Late Love is intensely verbal; its texture is woven from both short and long lines and sentences. It's also both intensely personal and cultural, fusing the incidents and trials of daily and domestic life with the palpable presence of literature and art into a seamless whole, alternating between two poles: "To see the light, one has to see the dark."

-John Koethe, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at UWM. Author of Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016, The Swimmer, and ROTC Kills.