Emily Grosholz: A Walk in the Wilderness

Emily Grosholz (1950-2026) was a poet of reasonability and sensibility, of portentous breadth and depth in the subjects of her poetry –mathematics, cosmology, nature, family, travel, love, art works, friendship, loss, quotidian joy, and more–, and of tremendous richness of poetic resources. Above all, her poetry harmonized truth, goodness, and beauty under the guidance of Nous, intelligence. Her poems were always elegant.

I have been reading her Stars of Earth: New and Selected Poems nearly constantly over the last three years, a poem or two in the evening several times per week, while in Brooklyn, where my autographed copy of her book resides. Since I learned of her passing on Saturday, I have been reading some of my favorite poems and also new ones to me. Her poetry is one of the ways in which she is still with us.

Tonight, I came across a poem from A Year (2016) that surprised me in the way it resonates with Henry David Thoreau’s poetic prose in “Walking” and with Mary Oliver’s poetry, but remains Emily’s own voice and style, in the details she regards and the ways she describes them. I knew she was a walker, but I believe this is the first poem where I really sense her walking, in this case, in a valley in Pennsylvania.

I share the closing stanza of “Where the Wild Things Are” in honor of her memory. I was blessed to have known her, to have been her student (she was also an outstanding philosopher), and I continue to be blessed to hear her voice in my mind as I read her poetry.

...when I go walking across the valley
I've learned to stick to weedy border farm roads,
Hard to pursue, reverting to vetch or bramble:
Those roads where wilderness asserts itself
In miniature, where clouded sulphurs cluster
Near puddles, and those butterflies we like to call
Coppers, purples, blues, bits of the visible spectrum
Lighter than air, go tumbling over the clover,
And mingle with satyrs, nymphs, and painted ladies!

Gracias, Emily, por tanto.