The Sword of Eden: Eve and Mary Speak by Gracia Grindal (review)

In sixty-seven beautifully fashioned sonnets, the author takes us on an imaginative journey into the thoughts, dreams, regrets, passions, and hopes of Eve, the mother of all living, and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. The book will be of special interest to worship and Bible study leaders, Lutheran secondary school teachers and college professors, and laypeople who love poetry.

Through the discipline of the sonnet form, Grindal waxes inventively about what these women, of whom we know relatively little, might have revealed to us about their lives. Like Emily Dickenson, Grindal challenges the reader to “dwell in possibilities” as each poem divulges what Mary and Eve might well have thought regarding their respective roles in the salvation story.

The first half of the book, “The Book of Eve,” focuses on the intimate thoughts of the world’s first mother. Eve tells of the passion and bliss she found in her love of Adam as they reveled in each other, delighted in the unbarred fruit of Eden and, with childlike delight, lay under the canopy of an unpolluted night sky serenaded by choirs of angels. Then everything falls apart as we go immediately to the temptation and the horrors wrought thereby.

Eve expresses her feelings of guilt, tells of her loss of innocence, and testifies how her quest for knowledge quickly lost its allure. She weaves stories of her gullibility and expresses the utter isolation she experiences as her sons and husband work in the fields while she labors alone at her housework. She yearns for a daughter to keep her company and watches helplessly as the sin of envy causes Cain to slay his brother. In a most unexpected twist, Adam confesses his infidelity in sonnet XV (16).

Book II, “Mary Ponders,” begins with the Annunciation and proceeds to Mary’s reflective responses to Gabriel’s words. She thinks about Eve’s temptation and how she has been asked to be part of the restoration of paradise. She visits Elizabeth, speaks of Joseph’s kindness and decency as he travels with her to Bethlehem, and shares her reflections on significant events in the life of Christ from his birth through the Day of Pentecost. The final poems tell of “Old Mary” and her death, wherein she trusts her son will raise her to realms of endless light.

The sonnets of Mary are of particular use in worship services from Christmas to Pentecost. Every poem speaks to our theological imagination, providing potent, lyrical insights concerning these extraordinary women who shaped significantly the world in which we dwell, and the everlasting world that is to come.