Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 72pp
$14.95 plus S&H
2012, ISBN 978-1-936419-14-2
Edythe Haendel Schwartz is the author of “Exposure,” Finishing Line Press, 2007, a nominee for the California Book Award. Her poem “A Natural Phenomenon,” won first prize in the 2012 Friends of Acadia Poetry competition, and her poem “Resist” was a winner in Persimmon Tree’s 2011 Western States Poetry Competition. In 2006 and 2008, Edythe was awarded grants for residencies at The Vermont Studio Center. Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Calyx, Cave Wall, California Quarterly, PMS, Poetica, Natural Bridge, Earth’s Daughters, Poet Lore, Pearl, Sierra Nevada Review, Persimmon Tree, Potomac Review, JAMA, Hawaii Pacific Review, Vermont Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Runes, Spillway, Thema, and Water-Stone, among others. Now retired from the faculty, Department of Child Development, California State University, Sacramento, Edythe is a visual artist as well as a poet. She lives with her husband, Sy, in Davis, CA, where she swims daily with the Davis Aquatic Masters and dances with Pamela Trokanski’s Dance Workshop’s Second Wind group.
April 12, 2013 A Palette of Leaves is nominated as a finalist for the 2013 Eric Hoffer Award – da Vinci eye for cover art.
Listen to an interview with Edythe on the Sacramento, CA Capital Public Radio program “Insight”:
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Praise for Edythe Haendel Schwartz’s Work
Edythe Haendel Schwartz is a poet with a painterly eye. She has taken glad instruction from the many visual artists her poems evoke, and she understands perspective, detail, and the correspondence between color and emotion. In an era of the series and the serial, the poems in A Palette of Leaves are refreshingly discrete. Schwartz’s palette is full, her subject nothing less than life. If her hues are often dark it is because she understands the place of pain in “the dazzle of an ordinary day,” the fact that the dead leaf and the green share the same spectrum. There is a resilience in these poems that gives me hope
– Joshua McKinney – author of Mad Cursive
Edythe Haendel Schwartz’s poems portray a multitude of subjects with deft brushstrokes. A Palette of Leaves quilts together family and friends, travel and study, artists and scientists, from pre-war New York to South American rafting trips, always with an eye (and an ear) for the dissonance of human suffering. With precise colors, tight lines, and a fierce focus, Edythe’s poems get inside her characters, so the reader gains many perspectives at once: painter, model, and poet become one. – Bob Stanley, Sacramento CA Poet Laureate, 2009-2012
A Palette of Leaves by Edythe Haendel Schwartz reviewed at New Pages
New Pages reviewed “A Palette of Leaves” in their May 31, 2013 edition.
Calyx Journal reviewed “A Palette of Leaves in issue 27:3
Alice Neel Paints Futility of Effort
Oil on canvas, 1930
I’ve drawn the small figure in meager space,
in lost light, colorless, her face
twisted, her head caught
between the bed posts.
I read about it in the paper—
her mother was in the kitchen
ironing. I’ve drawn a hanging
line, a fragile vertical
to slice the canvas, the girl
strangled by chance
the way my daughter was.
Diptheria took her,
the white threads webbing her
throat, choking off air. No care
could cut the fever, care no weapon
against the viscous membrane. A brush
of fate so fast and dark, lamp black, ochre
and in a corner hovering, one eye
a paralyzing stare, no eye
to see, and where her
mouth would be, no breath
to draw.