Eve Grubin’s lat­est poet­ry col­lec­tion, Boat of Let­ters, enters into con­ver­sa­tion with ancient rab­bis and Jew­ish wis­dom to explore uni­ver­sal top­ics of love, grief, and long­ing. Divid­ed into three sec­tions — ​“The Book of Love,” ​“Grief Dia­logue,” and ​“Keep Not Know­ing” — Gru­bin explores spir­i­tu­al obser­va­tions and nuances of lan­guage as she con­tem­plates mean­ing in the everyday. 

The col­lec­tion begins with sev­er­al love poems to the speaker’s part­ner and chil­dren. In ​“Bone of My Bone,” the speak­er reflects on her husband’s mar­riage pro­pos­al and how he ​“asked with­out think­ing about how our first child/​would wake every three hours/​each night for two years … // … asked with­out think­ing about how our next baby/​would be born ear­ly, very ear­ly.” Being will­ing to go on an adven­ture through life with some­one else with­out know­ing what the future holds is an act of faith. Gru­bin describes the chal­lenges of mar­riage, show­ing kind­ness, patience, and restraint when anger or frus­tra­tion might be eas­i­er. In some poems, the speak­er gives advice to her­self: ​“When mak­ing a request,/don’t use the word ​‘you.’/Say ​‘I’d love a clean sink”/with no expectations.”

Through the use of brief lyri­cal poems that often rely on silence and white space on the page, Gru­bin writes about lan­guage itself, the way we speak and read. In her poem ​“A Def­i­n­i­tion,” Gru­bin con­nects this to Judaism: ​“We find the oral law/​in spaces between words.” In ​“Read­ing,” she states, ​“When I fin­ish a nov­el, hold its steam­ing in my hands,/I stare over the edge, listening.//The pages are soft and the let­ters sting.” Lin­ger­ing with a book after fin­ish­ing it and hold­ing on to its sto­ry and lan­guage also feels very Jew­ish, as Jews read and read the same holy books and sto­ries each year, aim­ing to find new lessons and real­iza­tions in old texts. 

Blue — a holy, unique col­or men­tioned in the Torah — is a motif in Boat of Let­ters. In some poems, it is asso­ci­at­ed with holi­ness, such as in a metaphor of Moses as ​“the sin­gle blue thread fluttering/​across a white gar­ment,” or glimpsed in lake-eyes, the tongue of a snake, a dream, the lips of a baby after a bath. Blue is woven through­out this col­lec­tion, con­nect­ing the holy and the mun­dane, and poems about mar­riage with poems about pain and death, includ­ing the pan­dem­ic and Octo­ber 7.

Jew­ish rit­u­al is a way to punc­tu­ate expe­ri­ence, and in the case of los­ing a loved one, rit­u­al helps sur­vivors move through the grief process. In ​“The Laws,” Gru­bin writes about mourn­ing after the pass­ing of her moth­er: The women had washed and bathed her body./This is required./They did not talk dur­ing the prepa­ra­tions. This is also a law.” This direct, mat­ter-of-fact poem ends with the stan­za: ​“I wore the wound­ed shirt./How do I say this? I could bare­ly breathe/​for the stream­ing inside me./I sat on a low chair — /​this too because of the laws.”

Grubin’s poet­ry is mov­ing and med­i­ta­tive. It is a col­lec­tion that blends a Jew­ish woman’s expe­ri­ence with yearn­ings for a future of faith and understanding.