Overview

The Epistles to Eve are letters in the form of sonnets, asking Our Mother Eve how she established civilization after the fall. They were written at the end of the COVID pandemic and the state of the world was troubling. It seemed that when it was over so much had changed that we would need to recreate a new culture out of fragments. Who better to ask than Eve? It engaged the author's whimsey after two years in confinement. It was clear after the world emerged from its confinement there would be reassessments of how we had acted, as well as a loss of confidence in the leadership as there had been after other pandemics. How would we reinvent ourselves and our culture the author wondered, so she asked Eve fundamental questions and meditated on our connections to creation and the new creation-death and life. It also includes the author's faith journey through these times. In addition, there are a variety of small poems, epigrams, plus another meditation in sonnets, on the topics in Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, a book the author had grown to love as she taught it for many years. Taking the lofty topics in Augustine and relating them to times and people in our own time gave it a structure for meditation on the holy life. While the sonnet form is complete unto itself, over the years, the author has used the form as a narrative form and continues to do so.

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"Gracia Grindal's new poetry collection offers spiritual reflection in the traditional poetic forms this poet has mastered. She thinks chiefly in sonnets that move through their lines with grace and verve, especially in her Dantean 33 poems to Eve. Recent events weigh heavily in this sequence. ""Chaos flares up over the unstrung world,"" and the word ""germs"" recurs, along with frequent complaints against ""ministries"" whose secular ""edicts"" and ""decrees"" are seen by this poet to be less protective than soul-shrinking. -Robert Schultz, John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Roanoke College and poet, Winter in Eden and Vein Along the Fault."

Author Information

Gracia Grindal, Luther Seminary Professor of Rhetoric Emerita, received her MFA from the University of Arkansas in Poetry in 1969. She taught Creative Writing at Luther College, Homiletics and Hymnody at Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN. She has written several books of poetry over the past forty years, Sketches Against the Dark, (1984) A Revelry of Harvest, (2002) The Sword of Eden (2018) and Jesus the Harmony: Gospel Sonnets for 366 Days (Fortress 2021) favoring the sonnet form. This latest book, a continuation of poetry about our Mother Eve, continues in that tradition with other formal poetry written over the past decade.

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