"'Without a Claim' is a modern Book of Psalms. Indeed, the glory in these radiant sacred songs meld an art of high music with a nuanced love of the world unlike any we've heard before. No matter your mood upon entering this world you'll soon be grateful, and enchanted. In any such house of praise, God herself must be grateful." ? Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of 'Failure' and 'The God of Loneliness' Grace Schulman, who has been called 'a vital and permanent poet' (Harold Bloom), makes new the life she finds in other cultures and in the distant past. 'In Without a Claim', she masterfully encompasses music, faith, art, and history. The title poem alludes to the Montauk sachem who sold land without any concept of rights to property, and meditates on our own notion of ownership: 'No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn, / cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields, / given the title, never the dominion.' She traces the illusion of rights, from land to objects, from our loves to our very selves. Alternatively, she finds permanence in art, whether in galleries or on cave walls, and in music, whether in the concert hall, on the streets of New York, or in the waves at sea. AUTHOR: Grace Schulman is the author many acclaimed books of poetry. For her poetry she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Aiken-Taylor Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, New York University's Distinguished Alumni Award, and three Pushcart prizes. Schulman is a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She is a former director of the Poetry Center (1978?1984) and a former poetry editor of The Nation (1971?2006).
