In a poem called “Here and There,” collected in The Stars of Earth, her volume of new and selected poems published in 2017, Emily Grosholz asked, “What will I miss when I’m gone?” The question is still being asked, though Emily died May 2nd at age 75. I can hear the genuine curiosity in her voice, the guiding intelligence of real inquiry. She was a traveler in mind and body who knew many countries, especially France, in addition to her native place. When young, she found romantic entanglement abroad. Then, re-anchored in Pennsylvania, she made a rich family life with her husband, Robert Edwards, and her four children. She cherished gifts of the earth, including our most fruitful human connections:
Daylilies my mother liked to set
Roadside in June. Pale Greek anemones
She never traveled far enough
To find wild, as I did once or twice, but
Maybe I’ll bring her some, if over there
Windflowers blow beside a cloudy sea.
I will always wonder whether, writing that poem, Emily had already sensed that something was leaving her or that she was losing her voice. I am not the only friend she telephoned a few years ago, just to catch up, finding the conversation broken by long pauses in her search for words.
Exactly forty years ago I met Emily in New York City. Dana Gioia’s first collection, Daily Horoscope, was being launched at the Center for Book Arts. I won’t drop the names of other writers present, only note that many were already friends of The Hudson Review, one of the places I most aspired to publish in. A 31-year-old graduate student and manual laborer, I was star struck.
Dana has provided me with a photograph of Emily at that happy occasion. She faces the camera with a sort of archaic smile, though her eyes have life in them and a bright puzzlement. A group of us went out afterwards for dinner or drinks, and sometime later I found myself in the car as Dana gave Emily a lift to a friend’s apartment. Dana and Emily were my elders, far more worldly and sophisticated than I. Yet despite their emerging stature, they included me like a younger brother in the art.
That night I acquired not only Daily Horoscope, but also Emily’s first book, The River Painter, containing some of the poems of hers that still move me the most, including “Letter from Germany,” “Katerina’s Garden” and “Remembering the Ardèche.” I found her voice formally assured but never hidebound and admired her graceful restraint as well as her deep feeling and lyricism. I learned from her.
Another friend I met that night, Michael Peich, later joined with Dana in founding the West Chester University Poetry Conference, where so many literary friendships prospered, and where I got to know Emily well. She was gifted at friendship, someone I never tired of seeing whose open conversation was fun and who never needed to show off or dominate. Once, she gently chided me for sitting on a panel of exclusively white male speakers. She wasn’t condemning us, just asking why it was so and not otherwise.
Emily was a superb poet, critic and translator. Her versions of Yves Bonnefoy, done in her “accustomed, haphazard, admiring way,” as she put it, are among the very best we have. She also had a doctorate in Philosophy and wrote or edited a dozen books in that field. Committed to social justice, she was a Professor of African American Studies and English at Penn State, in addition to her Philosophy positions there and in Paris. She was a polymath, a key advisory editor here at the review for four decades.
There is so much more to say about her eight books of poems, her translations, essays and other work, always carried out with such acumen and lack of self-importance. In this small remembrance I cannot do justice to her large body of beautiful work, but I can quote her—this time from an early sonnet, “Siesta”:
But the eye is aethereal, that watches over
the tranquil cool Aegean, mantle of blue
woven east and west with the stitch of wind.
We see beyond our country into another,
familiar, never attained, where scattered islands
gather like the dream’s immortal children.
I do not know what she is missing now in that other country, but I know we are missing Emily.