The Paintings Of Our Lives (2001)

“Though a tone of elegy and remembrance runs through, the collection also contains poems of celebration and wry humor, a view of the world which affirms that ‘on a blank day you can be seized -- and blessed.’ Schulman is a wonderfully rich and humane artist; her exquisitely formed poems are lyrical, pensive, graceful -- a praise and a blessing at once.” - Ian Tromp, Poetry, August 2001.

“The Paintings of Our Lives is a frieze of praise and grief, psalm and elegy, alive to all the senses in a vivid present while textured and layered with memory. The sonnet sequence ‘One Year Without Mother,’ an elegaic masterpiece, also recreates the substance of a certain almost-vanished New York life with lyrical, Nabokovian precision.”- Marilyn Hacker

“Delicacy of mind and ear, and gentleness of spirit, emerge together with quiet assurance in these poems and give them their authority and pose, their elegance, authenticity and spirit. These are poems whose deeply informed humanity allows us to use that word with hope.” -W. S. Merwin

“Engagements of a full-hearted, contemplative life are with loyalty pursued, with liberality mastered in these new poems of Grace Schulman’s, whose comprehending stanzas (‘I look down from small but lustrous rooms, our residence’) are the pledges of her continuing task, joyfully assumed: ‘bricks to be transmuted into song.’ ”-Richard Howard

“All this time -- we hardly knew it -- Grace Schulman was the poet of our city. She joins Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, other singers of New York. Only she is totally at home here, unselfconscious, writing her wise and lovely songs from her ‘brick aerie.’ ”-Gerald Stern