Voices from the First Gilded Age by Ed Granger

Voices from the First Gilded Age takes us back and forth across the Atlantic, from London to New York to Paris, through the epistolary conversations of husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, children and their parents. These poems reflect the abiding concerns of their time—from the 1890s to the First World War—as well as our own, with subjects that range from finding a suitable match for an eligible daughter and keeping the servants in line to politics, miscarriage, and the ravages of war. Full of observations both witty (“There’s nothing quite so/ instructive as scorn blazing from the green eyes/ of a matriarch whose soul has long been given/ over to the running of this house”) and terse (“One’s pedigree will out”), this unusual first collection shows Ed Granger to be part historian, part eavesdropper, and pure poet.

–Sue Ellen Thompson, Winner of the 2010 Maryland Author Award and editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry