By the age of 18, New York-born naturalised Irish poet Grace Wilentz had lost both of her parents, and her “home, in every sense of the word”.
Wilentz’s father, Eli Wilentz – a celebrated literary publisher, editor and bookshop owner in Greenwich Village – died in 1995, leaving 10-year-old Grace and her sculptor mother, Pamela Endicott, who developed breast cancer soon after her husband’s death.
“My father had spinal cancer,” says Wilentz. “They were long illnesses for them both. In my first collection, The Limit of Light, I tried to tell the story as best I could of how I lost both my parents and my home. I had to tell that story before I could move on to anything else.”
Two poems from The Limit of Light make me cry when I read them: Last Look, in which the young poet takes a final photo of her mother’s art studio – where as a child she watched her work – before closing the door on it forever; and Pretending to Say Goodbye at the Village Temple, with its devastating final lines:
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The sense life made runs ahead of me –
a wild pony pulling its trap,
a startled child at the reins.
“When my mother was diagnosed with cancer soon after my dad passed,” says Wilentz, “it brought a huge amount of fear. I was aware I was in a very different situation to many of my peers. There was a fundamental instability about what the future would hold. I remember almost crumbling under the pressure of it.
“My mother’s cancer re-metastasised as brain tumours when I was around 15. Back then I was on the basketball team at school. I remember my mother was in hospital and I was in our apartment on my own. I called into the hospital before morning basketball practice to see her.”
Wilentz’s mother was having surgery at the time. “I said, How did your surgery go? She said, I gave the anaesthetist a real scare, because when he was administering the anaesthesia, my heart stopped. And after this conversation, I went to basketball practice and did my day at school, then went home and made myself dinner.”
The type of radiation that Wilentz’s mother was having for her brain tumours carried a high risk of causing early onset dementia. “And that happened,” says the poet. “By some interpretations, the school maybe should have notified child protection that I was a young person without parental care.
“It was a tricky balancing act – can my mother cover this situation enough to keep me at home? The alternative was having to move out of state to live with relatives, and be pulled out of my final years in high school. What she really wanted for me was that I’d be able to have a third level education. Just to see me to the next step.”
[ Patience and Order: a poem by Grace WilentzOpens in new window ]
Fortunately, some teachers and parents from Wilentz’s school supported and advocated for her.
“I remember there was a point at which we were living cheque to cheque on social security from my dad’s military service, which you get as a child,” says Wilentz.
“One day the cheque stopped coming, and our debit card was out of commission. A family from the school figured out how to row in. They lived around the corner from the school in a beautiful apartment, and they gave me a set of keys and said, Come in any time to lie down, or make yourself a sandwich from the fridge.”
Natural as rain, tears flow from Wilentz’s eyes. I apologise that my questions are upsetting. “It’s fine,” she reassures kindly. “It’s just the emotions. They always come with this.”
When Wilentz was 17, as her mother’s illness advanced, “I would come home and she might have a bruise; or have tried cooking something and nearly created a fire. So we got a carer during the day, who would arrive as I went to school and leave when I came home.
“I tried to drop out of high school because I thought the pressure was too much. A few of the teachers pulled me up by the collar and said universities are interested in you. You have a real chance here. You have to finish your degree. I’m glad they did that.
“I have to take the lessons and the wisdom that landed during that time,” says Wilentz, “and be grateful for the resilience of having made it through, which is something I carry into the rest of my life; although I would never wish the experience on anybody.
“There’s also a flip side – which is that I was blessed with two parents who loved me very much. I’m aware that some people never have that, though their families might enjoy good health and a long period of time with each other.”
My only Irish roots are that my father used to drink with The Clancy Brothers
— Grace Wilentz
As an artist, Wilentz was inspired by her sculptor mother. “She carved out a practice that was sustainable and made an honest career for herself. That example will never leave me. It’s helped show me the way, as I make my own days as an artist.” Forging that path is the main concern of Wilentz’s second poetry collection, Harmony (Unfinished).
One of the many gorgeous, tender, uplifting poems in the collection is In Which My Dad Teaches Me to Throw a Punch. “I go along,” says the poem, “because I understand him to be resourcing me. I might need this later ... that boy on the school bus who’s been giving me shit, now he is really going to fucking get it.”
Wilentz credits her father – a first-generation immigrant from a Jewish Lithuanian family – for passing on his love of literature, including Irish literature.
From the late 1940s onwards, Eli Wilentz was friends with leading writers of the day. He was co-owner, with his brother Ted, of the famous Greenwich Village 8th Street Bookshop and cultural hub; co-founder of the influential small press Corinth Books; and editor of the groundbreaking anthology The Beat Scene.
Bob Dylan met poet Gregory Corso at 8th Street; Brendan Behan and Anais Nin held court there; and when he was on the road, Jack Kerouac used the shop as his New York address.
Eli Wilentz published and co-published a remarkable number of important writers of the period, including John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and LeRoi Jones (later called Amiri Baraka).
Young Grace regularly met writers in her home. She recalls the profound influence of African American jazz poet Ted Joans, who often stayed with her family.
“Ted would ask me about my dreams over breakfast,” says Wilentz. “When he went back travelling abroad, he’d send my father a poem he’d written about my dream.” Grace shows me one of these treasured poems, called Grace Notes.
“It’s postmarked 1988, from Madagascar, so I was three years old when I was describing these dreams to Ted. I remember it was a revelation for me, because I realised that this interior life that we have – everything that goes on in the imagination – could be your career, your calling. And also, that the unconscious can be a source of poetry. I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do with my life.”
Wilentz has no Irish blood (“My only Irish roots are that my father used to drink with The Clancy Brothers”), but she loved Irish poetry from her early teens, especially Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.
After her mother’s death, scholarships allowed Wilentz to continue to third level education. At Harvard University, she did a degree in literature and (on a whim, so she could read Ní Dhomhnaill in the original) the Irish language. Her work brought her to the attention of Harvard teacher and poet, Seamus Heaney, who became a mentor.
Wilentz first came to Dublin when she was 20 to improve her Irish. Here she “found very few people who could speak Irish, and even fewer who could understand the mix of Ulster and Munster Irish that I’d been taught.”
In 2025, exactly on Bloomsday, it will be 20 years since Wilentz first visited Ireland. She knew immediately that she wanted to make a life here.
“Dublin, and especially where I’ve settled in The Liberties,” she says, “reminds me of where I grew up in Greenwich Village. Dublin is a big cosmopolitan city, with areas that have the sense of a village.”
Wilentz feels that when she moved to Dublin, she gained back much of what she had lost.
“Ireland has been very generous to me,” she says. “I have incredible friends who are like family. I’ve been able to build my artistic practice here. There’s an abundance of fresh air and bookstores and intellectual stimulation.
“This is a real moment where Irish literature is diversifying,” she says. “I’m an early part of that. I’m one of the first writers who’s not either born in Ireland or of Irish descent to be published by The Gallery Press, which bills itself as poetry and drama from Ireland.”
In her own way, Wilentz is helping to open the door. “I think antidotes to some of the more concerning global trends can be literature and art,” she says. “And making room for diverse voices, telling different stories.
“I love when I read a poem by someone I’ve never met, who has lived in a completely different context and time to me, and it speaks perfectly to my most private and personal experiences.
“That’s one of the most beautiful things about poetry,” Wilentz adds. “Its ability to make people feel understood and reconnected to universal human experiences. To let people know that we’re not alone in the things we go through, even though we might feel that we are.”
Harmony (Unfinished) is published by The Gallery Press
