The Sword of Eden
Eve and Mary Speak
Gracia Grindal
The Sword of Eden
Eve and Mary Speak
Copyright © 2018 Gracia Grindal. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4882-3
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4883-0
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Credits: Theology Today and Christian Century
Cover art: Tom Maakestad
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
For my friends the “old believers” whose conversations and support continued to edify and instruct me over the years
Oliver Olson
Jack and Pamela Schwandt
Walter Sundberg
Preface
Writing a sonnet sequence is a bold endeavor for a 21st-century poet. The sonnet, in the age of rap, postmodern language poetry, elliptical poetry, and confessional poetry, is not the poetic form of choice for most writers. But Gracia Grindal has deftly joined the ranks of those committed to the tenets of the New Formalism, which Dana Gioia describes as a rebellion against and correction to what was occurring in the poetry of the late 20th century: “the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative; and the denial of musical texture.”1
Grindal’s language is careful, each word chosen for sound and sense. These are poems that are never verbose but exact, the language musical and interesting. For example, the description of Eve’s temptation draws us into the scene and presents an idea that is disarming in its freshness: the flattening of the earth after the fall, the dramatic loss of dimension.
“Reach out, my lovely, toward the web I weave—”
His tongue glistens with possibilities.
A globe breaks like a glass of ruby wine
Filling the fissures of the earth with shade,
Knowing, I bid my languid lover dine.
We feed on chaos in the naked glade,
My appetite gorging on shady night.
The earth goes flat, the moon a plate of light.
What is most remarkable is that Grindal makes the oldest stories of our faith—stories we have heard so often that we do not really hear them anymore in their retelling—new, immediate and absolutely captivating.
Contrary to the current fashion, Grindal is not writing poems that are thinly disguised autobiographies. These are not confessional poems, except that poems about women by a woman would naturally show certain predilections that come from shared experiences—even with the mother of the human race and even with the mother of God. Most importantly, these poems provide compelling narratives of two figures—Eve and Mary—who stand alone yet interlink, as certainly they must if Mary is the second Eve. Both, for example, are inextricably tied to the needs and cries of their children. Mary feels the pain of her child’s circumcision, and in these poetic lines we also hear the echoes of his future suffering, and hers:
He wept—
I saw the dolorous way opening up,
To suffer his wounds a mother cannot do
Only caressing him against the hurt
Sorrow no longer singular, but two. . . .
Likewise, Eve, always a mother, comments in one of these poems about her desire to take on her children’s suffering herself.
Let it be me, I wept, Lord, let their bad dreams
Shriek in the halls of my head, instead of theirs,
Let me take up each wound into my bones,
Puncture my flesh with palliatives for screams
And let the tubes hanging from their fears
Enter my veins, stumbling toward you, alone.
What is most refreshing about this collection is its avoidance of the narcissistic tendencies of so much contemporary verse in which meaning is irrelevant or created primarily by the reader’s imagination. Grindal intends for us to see and to understand. In the final poem of the collection, Grindal writes, “He mothers us, in him we are reborn”—and in that one line is the core of meaning in these poems. These two mothers, one disobedient, the other most obedient, one stepping into darkness outside the gates of Eden, the other walking toward the light her Son emanates, provide the template: we are rooted in this good but fallen earth, as was Eve; and we simultaneously reach toward heaven, as did Mary. Christ, her son, is the mother of our rebirth.
Wallace Stevens has written, “After the final no there comes a yes/And on that yes the future world depends.” Grindal well understands the implications here. The “no” of the expulsion from Eden becomes the “yes” of Mary to the angel Gabriel. We live between “no” and “yes,” in the already not yet.
Jill Peláez Baumgaertner
Wheaton College
1. Dana Gioa, “Notes on the New Formalism,” The Hudson Review, Vol 40 (autumn 1987), p. 408.
Introduction
These sonnets on Eve and Mary have been a project of my last few years. Teaching Bible studies that focused on Eve and Mary made me more and more curious about them. While we know much less about Eve than Mary, neither woman has much to say. What they did say, however, has echoed down through Christian history. The church has meditated on them, written on them, painted them, included them in theological commentary and history; both have been characterized in popular and pious history: Eve is to be admired, despite her disobedience. Mary is to be admired for her obedience. Both suffer from cliché existences, Eve the temptress, Mary, impossibly good. Both are pivotal to the Christian faith. Eve is often blamed unmercifully, by especially the early Christian fathers, for bringing sin, and worst of all, sexuality, into the world, though some do admire her for her curiosity, and bravery in reaching out to taste of the forbidden fruit. On the other hand, Mary is seen as holy and beyond reproach. Luther deeply admired and valued Mary as the first Christian in some ways because she bore the Word of God in her body as all faithful Christians do.
The main scene in Eve’s life is her decision to heed the tempter’s voice and that she blamed him for her fall. We do know that she had three sons, but other than that we know nothing, except as a woman she had a husband, sons, and she watched them grow up. She suffered the sorrow of discovering Cain had killed Abel. Most of the rest of her life we can imagine as being like many women—being in love, mothering her children, raising Seth wondering if he was the promised Messiah, growing weary of her mate, suffering middle age, seeing her son fall in love and marrying, facing old age and death. In a way, her experiences are those of everywoman, something I wanted to explore in these poems.
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