Burn Down the Icons (1976)

“When feelings flare up, when speech burns with a Pentecostal flame, Schulman is in her element. ‘Burn Down the Icons’ is written by a poet posted in a firetower, who dreads and waits for the next change, and ‘change is holy.’ As a memorial of change, a brand subsists, an icon. Throughout the book runs the curious word ‘veronica’ -- and the figure of Saint Veronica, who mopped Jesus’s brow before the crucifixion, the image of His face imprinted thereafter on her handkerchief. Her name means ‘true icons.’ Schulman explores these resonances, discovering the paradox that ‘Iconoclasts impress indelible / Veronicas on living things . ’” Schulman always writes with care and clearly has a high respect for craft, the first condition for excellence. -Alfred Corn The New York Times Book Review July 3, 1977.

Grace Schulman’s Burn Down the Icons is an inspiration to the reader  to look beyond the individual broken parts of the universe in order to find a renewed hope for complete unity -Choice  June, 1977.

It is a dazzling, fresh collection, and highly original. A literary critic, editor and teacher, Schulman’s poems combine deep passion with a kindly, quirky wit. -San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1977.

“Grace Schulman proves herself to be a poet of intense vision, one who has a sense of the seriousness of the poet’s work in our world. Hers has been no less than to rekindle -- re-fire -- attitudes of reverence for life, while letting her experience stand in for the distinct experience of each of us. Burn Down the Icons is serious, pained, but its strain of humanistic hope is inspirational in the deepest sense of that word.”  -Parnassus, Spring/Summer, 1978

“In Grace Schulman’s Burn Down the Icons, fire is the symbol left when all other images have been set ablaze.As Troy burns, she is Cassandra crying: ‘The world’s on fire./The flames are real!’ In the title poem, the poet admits even her Cassandra role has died; she has become ‘fire and air.” In the book’s last poem, Schulman asserts that the burned icons remain as indelible prints on the mind, and she shines in flames, ‘burning but not consumed, / changing to be myself.’” -James Finn Cotter, “Poetry of the Apocalypse,”America, April 7, 1977.

“Quotes from David Ignatow and Stafford on the book’s attractive dust cover laud Miss Schulman’s work. How fine to read her poems and discover that these critics’ perceptive comments pale beside the book . . . The Empedoclean elements of earth, air, fire and water, a sense of life’s flux, and the power of love recur throughout the book.” -Jim Thomas, The Chariton Review,  Spring, 1978.

“So steady in vision, so congenial in human association, so fluent and inventive in language, Grace Schulman renews our faith in ourselves and in the language we use for finding each other.”  -William Stafford

“There are poems in this first book that bear reading over and over, remarkable for the sense they convey of a transcendent force at work in them . This book will take its place in the mainstream of American sensibility.   -David Ignatow

“On every page of Grace Schulman’s fine first book, I found something that arrested and surprised. It must have taken high skill and great care to persuade so many unexpected words to take their places, but effort is never apparent . . . Everywhere in her work I met toughness of mind and craft . . . Several of Grace Schulman’s passionate poems ought to survive whenever the future shakes all living poets down into its own kind of Greek anthology.” -X. J. Kennedy

“Shown in the poems is a person every reader will recognize as his or her inner self -- that self which is so significant and, at the same time, so elusive to express or explain.  She probes our most secret marrow at times, while expressing her own.” -May Swenson