Morning Prayer: Poems

"In her strong, spare debut, Grubin writes from, and about, her Jewish faith, exploring and justifying it in careful images from modern city life, and in juxtapositions of Jewish liturgy with her own memories of crisis and epiphany: 'I have had moments that make hope / superfluous.' Her most ambitious work gives philosophical and theological propositions a dramatic clarity, even when they explore what she does not know: Heaven is like unhappiness / on earth only inverted into a finer tone / I am certain of nothing.' Grubin (based in New York City and currently program director for the Poetry Society of America) is also a poet of illness and recovery, of childhood and of maternity, watching and worrying about young daughters, then considering (in the exceptional "Brooklyn Window") her links to her own mother and to the radical '60s. 'My transgressions hope I will seek them,' Grubin speculates in one passionate, long-lined meditation, 'as God wants me to pray.' For all its explorations and doubts, however, Grubin's collection finds a final strength in paradoxical belief, 'living/ inside the laws and the lightning.'" --Publishers Weekly