Description
Epistles to Eve
by Gracia Grindal
Full-length, paper
$20.99 List: $22.99
979-8-88838-538-8
2024
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This title will be released on May 10, 2024
Written during the pandemic of 2020-2022, the Epistles to Eve are a series of meditations in sonnet form on the breakdown of the cultured during that time. The poet asks Eve for advice on how to build a civilization. As the first woman she had to create life’s rituals, from birth to death and learn the facts of life that make living in a fallen world possible. The poems comment on our losses during the isolation of the pandemic, our need for connectedness, the futility of writing decrees against germs and the importance of people being together with rituals that give life. Culture helps us work to repair the ruins, but faith gives us the power to do so because it knows this world is penultimate, so Grindal also imagines her own ending in Paradise. She does not flee the world—other poems, short wry ballads and sonnets—are droll lyrics on life, raising children, couples marrying, and being buried—enjoying life’s ceremonies; her sonnets on St. Augustine’s Christian Doctrine (de doctrina Christiane) glory in the pleasures given by a loving God who became flesh to give us a good life, here and hereafter.
Gracia Grindal, Luther Seminary Professor of Rhetoric Emerita, received her MFA from the University of Arkansas in Poetry in 1969. She taught Creative Writing at Luther College, Homiletics and Hymnody at Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN. She has written several books of poetry over the past forty years, Sketches Against the Dark, (1984) A Revelry of Harvest, (2002) The Sword of Eden (2018) and Jesus the Harmony: Gospel Sonnets for 366 Days (Fortress 2021) favoring the sonnet form. This latest book, a continuation of poetry about our Mother Eve, continues in that tradition with other formal poetry written over the past decade.
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