Joyful Poems of Leave-Taking and Transience

Grace Schulman has always been a poet deeply rooted in place and time. Over four decades and six previous collections, her poems have returned to the familiar scenery of New York City and Long Island. She’s written about her childhood and young adulthood in the city, her parents’ time, her grandparents’ time, and the New York City of Henry James and Walt Whitman. Across the decades, the same streets and subway cars, houses and stores, theaters and museums, and beaches and harbors have set the scene. This rootedness has given her work power and depth.

But in Without a Claim, Schulman renounces ownership. It’s a book of leave-taking and transience, filled with poems about loss and decline, poems that look at the world intently but refuse to cling or assert dominion. The book is also filled with poems of joy and praise — but it’s a joy that is fleeting and praise for what passes.

In the title poem, she remembers moving years earlier from city to suburb, and although she clearly loves where she is living, she insists it is not hers to keep:

Raised like a houseplant on a windowsilllooking out on other windowsillsof a treeless block, I couldn’t take it in

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.This land we call our place was never ours.

Love for the current home is shadowed by memories of the previous one, of the disruption and strangeness of that earlier move. And in spite of the roots she knows lie beneath, and the years of possession (as that rhododendron has grown and flowered abundantly), she also knows it won’t last. She knows about those who came before: the sailors and whalers, the farmers, and before them the Montauk Indians — who left their names and not much else. She identifies with those who came and went, who passed through and left little trace, thinking of her own Polish immigrant ancestors. And it’s not just the place that she knows she can’t hold on to.

Duck under the elm’s branches, thick with leaves,on land deeded to us but not to keep,and take my hand, mine only to give

for a day that shines like corn silk in wind.We rent, borrow, or share even our bodies,and never own all that we know and love.

Even the body is not a permanent address. But by inviting others to come and partake, by freely sharing — the body, the house, the landscape — Schulman suggests that one can achieve a measure of freedom and joy. And really, what other choice does one have?

A recurring concern throughout the book is physical frailty — her own, and especially that of her husband. In “Moon Shell,” alone on the beach, she remembers how they used to walk together. But now: “You inch forward, step, comma, pause, / your silences the wordless rage of pain.” In “Danger,” they go out together, and she describes him:

taking the high risk of this morning, one hand on your cane, the other open

to catch honey-yellow blossoms falling just as our shadows fall on this narrow path.

Even on placid Long Island, ordinary life is risky; pain is never far. The best one can hope for is a certain uneasy balance between suffering and pleasure. One hand clings to a cane, while the other tries to catch falling blossoms. In “Before the Fall,” she describes the disorienting aftermath of a bicycle accident: “A stranger / lives inside this mask with slits for eyes, / this boot cast, the leg I thought I owned.” But remembering the ecstatic moment just before she fell, she exhorts herself:

Think of the rush, the salt, the taste of wind,the blown hair, bay of sparkling soda water,starry weeds the locals call bedstraw,

the miracle...