Eleanor

1

I was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
called Eleanor after my father, Elliott.

My daughter is Anna Eleanor, called
Anna. Her daughter, my granddaughter,

bears our name as well, only we call
her Sistie. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

is the name I bore until I married
Franklin and added a second field

of roses, from the Dutch, to my name.
Soon I will be name only: Anna

Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt: Anna
after my mother who died at twenty-nine,

Eleanor after my father who died
at thirty-four, field of roses, field

of roses. A name to be carved in stone––
yet a vision if you will see it––one

field of roses followed by another . . .

*****

58

When I look back over my life,
at every critical juncture,
my fundamental sense of humanity
was at stake, and that is
always the issue, isn’t it?

Love finds us so our empathy
toward others can grow.

Anguish finds us so compassion
grows.

The woman praised and honored––
world citizen, humanitarian,
statesman––Eleanor Roosevelt––

whoever that woman is––

she is the creation of the men
and women I loved––
they gave her to me
and I gave her away.

A new book by Gray Jacobik is always cause for rejoicing. And this one even more so, since, as of this moment, six women are running for US President. These poems in Eleanor Roosevelt voice draw us into her story; the difficult mother-in-law, the impossible expectations, the marriage that succeeded only through private accommodations . . .  Jacobik helps us see and feel the journey that led Eleanor to become the compassionate leader we remember: “Oh, I took back from him years ago / my vulnerability, sealed myself like a housewife / seals her preserves with paraffin.”  This is how she survived. And thrived.  Roosevelt pondered: “What good is / history . . . if no one ever learns?”—words for our troubled times. And we, contemporary readers of poetry, can learn, and learn again, the powerful lessons of this moving and courageous book.  Brava Gray Jacobik, for writing these poems, and for writing them so brilliantly.-Barbara Crooker, author ofThe Book of Kells (Cascade Books), winner of the Best Poetry book Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Some Glad Mornings (Pitt Poetry Series). 

Eleanor Roosevelt is the woman we need to hear right now–and the voice of poet Gray Jacobik puts a rose inside ER’s ever cogent, necessary thoughts, right in time for the 100th Anniversary of the vote for Women.
-Molly Peacock, author ofThe Analyst: Poems and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

This page-turning book of persona poems has the remarkable effect of bringing together the public and private lives of a woman for whom the two were carefully kept apart. Though grounded in extensive research, the book is, as Jacobik says,“an act of literary imagination”—one that brings its subject brilliantly to life through a thoroughly realized voice that makes us feel as if  we’re being spoken to in confidence.
-Martha Collins

Gray Jacobik has imagined for us a vivid lyric voice belonging to the mind of Eleanor Roosevelt. It is the voice of the private self, brimming with innermost desires, fears, angers, guilts, aspirations, loves. This voice provides a safe harbor, a place where she can unapologetically be herself, but it is also a voice that steadily records the growth of an evolving, complicated human being. Circumscribed by a multitude of inherited ideas about the duties of her gender, marriage, and class, Eleanor Roosevelt nonetheless forged for herself a soul and life that she could indeed call her own. With their etched clarity, these lyric poems tell that story, one that underpins and illuminates from within all we know about one of the great women of any century.
-Fred Marchant, Author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

Gray Jacobik
Pub date – March 3, 2020
Trade paper – 6 X 9″
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-75-4
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