At the Brink of Something

Eve Grubin’s Boat of Letters is an ongoing conversation with silence. From the quotidian to the theological, the poems feel like prayers, quiet interrogations in an unknowable world. Paul Celan comes to mind, as do Robert Lax, Emily Dickinson and St John of the Cross – though Grubin’s voice never resembles theirs.

Grubin’s poems are spare and imagistic, and often pare down into single lines or couplets. ‘The Poetics of Reticence’ is one such poem – a mystical via negativa that recoils into the page: ‘No stars, no wind. / The dark is clean, unspeaking. / Nothing seen.’ It performs her bare, minimal style: sharp line breaks, absence of rhetoric, and weighted silences.

‘The House of Our First Loving’ emphasises the importance of home. Here quiet images open into the void: ‘An empty chair, a blue mixing bowl. / Listening for steps crunching the snow.’ The stark nouns with full stops on each line evoke Ryōkan’s silent zen landscapes. We never quite know where we are; her bare images hold like safe foundations.

Throughout, Grubin weaves the texts, rituals, and ethical frameworks of Judaism into her domestic life. Torah grounds her through periods of grief, parenthood and disagreement. In ‘The Laws’, ritual supports her during her mother’s funeral: ‘I turned to where she lay, asked her to forgive me / as is the custom.’ The language itself becomes another kind of law – restrained, formal, allowing the emotion beneath it to remain implied rather than declared.

‘Mother to Daughter I’ addresses her mother’s death ...