foreword by Grace Schulman
Volume 14 of the May Swenson Poetry Award Series, 2010
"Reading Murawski, I think of the poet for whom this series is named. I recall especially her wonder at the miraculous in the quotidian. Whether May Swenson's subjects are commonplace or unfamiliar, she presents them with an urgency that builds their impact. Murawski carries on that great tradition."
—Grace Schulman, from the foreword
"'Who's to say details we select are soft enough, harsh enough?' asks Elisabeth Murawski. Whether the subject is childhood or religion, history or art, these poems are filled with images that are both soft and harsh, familiar and strange, and always original and moving."
—Linda Pastan, author of Queen of a Rainy Country
"The effect is cumulative and potent; the means is restraint, lines as taut as bow strings. The poems travel into dark places to find 'the sun at work behind every beheading' and the underlying principle is music that expertly matches the journey of the poem, forcing us along until we learn 'to be perfectly still.'"
—Myra Sklarew, author of Lithuania: New & Selected Poems and former president of the artist community Yaddo
"The poem 'Patients' ends with the image of painted-eyed dolls staring up 'as if there were things in this world / they didn't want to see.' Zorba's Daughter opens our eyes and confronts us with 'the underlying / sorrow of the world.' Yet the art of the collection makes us want to see and to know. Economical with words, Elisabeth Murawski possesses a great gift for choosing exactly the right ones to unveil the unsettling mysteries that lurk within our lives."
—Walter Cummins, editor emeritus of The Literary Review
In Zorba's Daughter, the fourteenth volume in the Swenson Poetry Award series, Elisabeth Murawski speaks from a vital and unique sensibility, finding in ordinary images an opening to the passion of human courage in the face of deep existential pain and ambivalence. These poems awaken our joy as well as guilt, our hope as well as grief. They often evoke a sorrowful music, like the voice of mourning, but even in pointing to "the black holes of heaven," Murawski turns our gaze upward.
Zorba's Daughter was selected for the Swenson Award by the distinguished poet Grace Schulman. An icon of the literary scene, Schulman is acclaimed for her searching, highly original, lyric poetry, as well as for her teaching and her influential tenure as the poetry editor at The Nation (1971-2006). Harold Bloom calls her "one of the permanent poets of her generation." Richard Howard says, "she is a torch."
Elisabeth during her visit to USU for a reading and presentations.
Elisabeth reads at the BYU English Reading Series
Wedding Fall-outTen, I wore a red hat to the wedding, red the color of weeping. Mine, the bleak house, the torn face-card. My sister flew from our street like a stained- glass butterfly. I wanted her back, protection from the king of the turning doorknob. Hope had spots on its skin like an old person’s. I climbed a ladder made of sand and forgetting. I lost the sky, decades of clouds. The clay- footed saints I turned to cackled and shuffled, twirling their blue umbrellas. |
Zorba's DaughterNight boasted it was eternity. But here now through the brown links of trees the sun spills dawn. Light's turn (dice on a table) to be eternal, a current to feed her house, abruptly wake her like a thief. Who will teach her divine collaboration? Who will love her dirty hands enough to leave her head unshaved? She goes barefoot as the sky, nectarine slice on a spoon, sweet coral carnation, little fish with wings in her heart, tempted to fly from the spear she cannot escape, resolved to die like Samson braced against the pillars of the temple, roaring for his eyes. |
