Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on
Long Island where she was a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant H.S., her
teacher was Frank McCourt, and later, at Bennington College and Columbia
University, where she received her MFA, she studied with Derek Walcott,
Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley
Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Stephen Sandy and Jorie Graham. Her books include The
English Earthquake (Bloodaxe) Bargain with the Watchman
(Oxford) and, One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press), illus. Van
Howell, all Poetry Book Society Recommendations/Special Commendations.
Her grandmother was a child vaudeville
actress, and her mother is an environmentalist. This background, and a
diverse range of jobs - as Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish
diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies' houses
- all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with
performers and visual artists. She has collaborated with the director
Rufus Norris and with composers Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip
Cashian and A.L. Nicolson. Shawna and Ron's Half Moon:
An Americana Satire and One Two, commissioned by the
English National Opera Studio, were performed there, at Hoxton Hall and at
Greenwich Theatre. Cassandra, a mini-opera written with her
composer father, Eric Salzman, has been performed in Dusseldorf, Vienna
and Oslo. She won 2nd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and major
prizes in the Arvon and Cardiff Poetry Competitions. Grants and awards
include those from the Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, London Arts
Board and the Society of Authors
Her work has frequently been broadcast on
BBC radio, and has read her work at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican,
Poetry Society, Troubadour and at festivals all over the UK, as well as in
Ireland, Spain and France. In the US, she has read at the Nuyorican Café,
the Walt Whitman Association and at Wesleyan Writers' Conference, where
she also taught, as a Fellow two years running. Her varied teaching work
has included Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island
University, London, regular teaching for the Arvon courses, for community
projects in London's East End and a residency at Springhill Prison, as
well as continuing work for the Poetry Society's educational programmes,
and co-devising the Open University's first Start Writing Poetry course.
Her poetry, fiction and features have
appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon, Review, Independent, Guardian,
Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, London Magazine, and in the anthologies:
The Firebox ed. Sean O'Brien; Hand in Hand ed. Carol Ann
Duffy; Sixty Women Poets ed. Linda France; Last Words eds.
Don Paterson & Jo Shapcottl; and two New Writing anthologies (British
Council/Picador/Vintage) eds. John Fowles, A.L. Kennedy, Penelope Lively
& George Szirtes.
She holds a West Midlands Writing
Fellowship at Warwick University, where she's taught the Poetry MA, and a
Royal Literary Fund Project Fellowship at Ruskin College, Oxford.
Currently, she is editing an anthology of Ruskin (Oxford) work, writing
fiction and an opera for Buxton Festival 2005 (composer: Ian McQueen). Her
latest book, Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe
2004) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She now lives in London.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY...
Double Crossing: New & Selected
Poems (Bloodaxe 2004)
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2004
Salzman's work has always been distinguished by its variety and
energy. She is a great lover and a great hater, with the wit and technique
to sustain both...Reading through the volume her central themes of the
splitting and doubling of self, loss and the embracing of loss, become
clearer and more poignant...
Her satirical bent, perhaps emboldened by
her libretto work, finds stronger rhymes and wicked themes, ranging from a
lover's new lovers to the overtly political - the Buddhas of Bamiyan,
female circumcision. The sensuality - the appetite - are strong as ever,
...Her poetic territory might provoke
comparison with Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. But, for all the boldly
acknowledged suffering, Salzman is an affirmative poet....an original and
enjoyable poet.
One Two II: a songbook (Wrecking Ball
Press 2003)
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2003
Daring, funny, fierce and musical, Eva Salzman has in her new
collection managed to combine a robust yet never unsubtle take on modern
life and love. Addressing itself primarily to the muse and the blues, this
'songbook' is woven through with references to history and myth so that
the personal is always balanced by an awareness of community to which she
sings.
The epigraph to the collection draws on
St Thomas 'When one becomes two what will you do?' and this becomes the
central metaphor of the book: twins, doubles, doppelgangers. For a short
book with so light a touch there's a tightness and surety to the way in
which preoccupations are worked through. So that amidst the personal
lamentation of 'Remembering Before Forgetting' and 'After Verlaine' are
juxtaposed a poem on the Brooklyn Bridge, a poem about the Buddhas of
Bamiyan, as well as a poem on the cutting of the OUP poetry list, the
sharply satirical 'In the OUP hospital' where she writes 'I'd rather be
lying unpublished / than be published by you and be dead'. Refreshing,
dangerous, ironic, always surprising, this is Salzman at her most
Salzmannesque.
Peter Porter:
With two published collections to her credit and a remarkable
compilation recently made ready for publication, Eva Salzman is one of the
most accomplished poets working in Britain today.
She is, of course, a New Yorker, but such
is the universal catchment area of poetry now that her living and writing
in Britain does not make her either an American or a British Poet, but
simply a very good one. Perhaps, though, her wit, directness and fresh
approach to language, whether fierce or lyrical, may be seen as American
qualities. I stress this sharpness towards language, the very edginess of
words themselves, since her poetry is always daring yet realistic - there
is never any fustian in her work.
Her first book, The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe),
was full of promise and showed a determination to make real events abut on
the visionary. With her second volume, Bargain with the Watchman (OUP),
several notches of excitement were racked up. She moved with great
certainty through that treacherous territory for poets: autobiography and
childhood induction. The eye was bright, but, rather in the way of Sylvia
Plath, so was the apprehension. Technically, the book dazzled.
Her latest collection, One Two II, adds a
classic tone to her sureness. The first possible title connects several
poems which deal with twins, fate, oracular pronouncements and the
conditioning of lives at the hands of the gods, while the second is a long
and warm account of discovering the self during foreign travel. Nothing
less like a picturesque or exotic pilgrimage could be imagined. The book
begins with excellent poems about uncompromising subjects - viz female
circumcision, the Brooklyn Bridge" (this a marvelously evocative
sonnet), the destroyed Afghan Buddhas, and the encroachment of fantasy on
worried minds. The longer section of the book is made up of runic verses
composed in and around music.
It is one of Eva Salzman's special gifts
to bring to the assembling of poetry some of the sense she has of the way
music is put together. This is not just parallel lyricism, but a true
understanding of how music and poetry share thematic bases, and an
aphoristic economy. From the first moment I encountered her poetry, I knew
that Eva Salzman was the real thing, devoted to a demanding but sparkling
art. She teaches the craft of verse writing, and especially enjoys working
with composers and practical enthusiasts. She is at the height of her
powers at the moment.
William Meredith & Richard Harteis:
Her first book, The English Earthquake, was indeed itself a
small earthquake in the poetry world in England. Like an American Samuel
Gulliver, she looks at English life and culture with the fresh eyes of the
foreigner. The insights are at times irreverent, at others simply
beautiful, but they are always true to the mark.
In the title poem, "the Ex-Major
winds back the years to the war - its incendiary thrill - his wife flushed
with disbelief as the earth moves unexpectedly," and describes
"the settling ground, innocent with rape and mustard, groaning under
its weight of roses." In other poems such as "Ending up in
Kent," and "Where I live" she becomes the poet/voyeur into
English life. There is a lovely quirkiness in her work, like the
idiosyncratic friends she writes of. Her view of sexual love is slant and
complex employing fresh, sometimes shocking metaphors.
The voice is that of a very sophisticated
woman, not quite at home in the world, ruminating on love, trying to make
sense of the nostalgia she feels eating at her soul. It is an appealing
voice. In her second book, Bargain with the Watchman, Eva perfects
the formal qualities of her work, particularly in the ambitious series of
poems on the muses as men and the long sequence, "Poor
Relations." An earlier poem, "Time Out," fractures the
formal scheme of the poem in a wonderfully appropriate way in the last two
words, rounding off the wit of her poetic conjecture on time.
Her imagery can be stunningly beautiful
with great lyric power. Eva Salzman is a young poet of proven merit and
great potential.
'Ms Salzman¹s restless imagination,
acute satiric intelligence and formal panache mark her out as one of the
finest poets around. Her work has developed from the sharply ironic and
often beautiful English Earthquake, through the more ambitious range of
Bargain with the Watchman, to her powerful new poems with their slangy
immediacy, song-led diction and splendid visual imagery.' - Michael
Donaghy
'Impressive, ingenious...an army of
Muses for the sex way.' - Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times
'A major talent....Plenty of bite...the
hormones are almost good enough to smell." - Poetry Review
'Eva Salzman's latest (work)
arrests its reader-listener with the same energy and musical directness of
voice as its highly acclaimed predecessor Bargain with the Watchman (OUP
1997)...explores with moving lyricism an idea which haunts much of the
compilation - the notion of the missing, the flip side, "beauty's
shadow"...Salzman's inventiveness commands attention as much with the
ear as with the imagination...her harmonic and metrical skills are at full
strength, at their most evocative perhaps in the wonderfully echoing
sonnet "Brooklyn Bridge"' - Jane Draycott, Poetry London
''(Auden and Lowell are present) in a
transatlantic volleying of influence. "The Dolphin", "For
Lizzie and Harriet" and parts of History inform Bargain with the
Watchman's first and last sections, (in which) sonnet variants depict
erotic and familial parleys with a brutally Lowellian immediacy. With the
publication of her second book, the American-born Londoner Salzman joins
the front ranks of Britain's "New Gen" poets.' - Diann Blakely, The
Antioch Review
'One nice thing about having been
in the trade for fifty years is that eventually you get to review books by
women like Eva Salzman...Bloodaxe has scored again...Unforgettable images,
controlled feeling, structured rhymes...A major talent..." Elizabeth
Bartlett, Poetry Review
'Eva Salzman is one of the most singular
and underrated of the wave of younger poets publishing at the moment...The
excellent title poem, "Bargain with the Watchman", is especially
successful because its ending gives the suggested danger an added
historical resonance...(This volume) will repay continued rereading (and)
should be valued as an antidote to poetry's present cults of domesticity
and discursive verse." - Conor O'Callaghan, Times Literary
Supplement
"Many of The English Earthquake's
best poems reveal a sharp humour, and at times Martian wit and the careful
structures produced by a desire to debunk the very art that is being
created. Salzman' subversive stance is used to entertaining effect. The
distinctive poise of The English Earthquake's best pieces promises
much." - David Kennedy, Times Literary Supplement
Plenty of bite...the hormones are almost
good enough to smell...as in "Spells", "Muse of
Spleen" and "Poor Relations"...But Salzman doesn't always
wear her "Don't mess with me" hat....Equally memorable are the
poems "Memorable" and "Christmas at the In-Laws",
while "Trepanned" and "Alex, Tiffany, Meg" are two
wilder (sonnets) that also deserve a mention. This is an excellent book.
If she does it with as much style as in Bargain with the Watchman, (she)
can stick a needle in me any time.' - David Wheatley, Poetry Review
'...une poesie du concret et de
l'inavouable, tranchante, lumineuse..." - Daniel Leuwers, Poesie
Premiere No. 16
'(In the) most
evocative...writing...the mechanism becomes invisible and sometime
mysterious. You can't see how those words produce that effect...(as with a
poem) by Eva Salzman...in which the heat rises form the page...(there's)
example after example of descriptive language which is as mysteriously
good as that, and yet...this brilliance of description (isn't an end in
itself, as with certain other writers)....the evocativeness of the
expression, the verbal richness, are not the 'trick' of the
poem..."Poor Relations"...has in it some of the most perfectly
integrated single poems...The kind of poetry you an go on finding things
in...The particular mix of almost documentary detail, wonderfully sharp
portraiture and an over arching irony recalls some of the best modern
American writing.' - Peter McSlov, Poetry North
'Her American voice swaggers
sassily across the proprieties of English metre, pricking the bloat of
monumentalism, and pointing up the slangy contingency of things." -
David Herd, New Statesman
'She has a satirist's eye and ear
alert to the emotional and verbal cliché, the easy lie, and she can be
gracefully ruthless. She can shift register from the formal and elegiac to
an astringent New York sarcasm. She can shuffle the vocabularies of love
and landscape, turn the grotesque poignant, the funny terrifying - a
facility rare on either side of the Atlantic.' Michael Donaghy
'She writes in a laconic, sassy
voice.' Sarah Maguire, The Listener
'Her writing takes the piss out of
the uprightness of poetic pose.' Briar Wood, City Limits
'Cool, appraising eye and sharp
tongue get to work on sex and men.' - Independent on Sunday
"Poetry Pick of the Year" 1997
'The English Earthquake
casts laconic and often merciless gaze on English life. In Bargain with
the Watchman, her capacity for disturbing surrealism intensified...taut
(poems) that use strange and elliptical images to explore the complexities
and compromises of sexual relationships." - Christina Patterson, Independent
Choice
'Through her sceptical...slant on
life...and fresh diction, Salzman here helps to revive the sonnet...She
forsakes the workshop to go to school on, say, Philip Larkin, and the
later Plath......(also recalling) the satire of Pound in Mauberley, Eliot,
or more recently, Larkin....cheeky, ironical...' - George Held, American
Book Review
'Her imagery can be stunningly
beautiful with great lyric power. Eva Salzman is a young poet of proven
merit and great potential.' - William Meredith & Richard Harteis
