Voices from the First Gilded Age

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. The Gilded Age in American and European history was a time of unprecedented economic growth and technological advance that created a widening rift between the newly wealthy and those toiling in mines, mills, and factories to support them. A time when the daughters of an upstart American aristocracy were herded by ambitious parents into the social whirl of London to be paired with scions of a staid Victorian English nobility. A time of cities transformed by skyscrapers and seas traversed by great ocean liners that seemed like floating cities to their first class passengers, who rarely encountered the immigrant families consigned to the lower decks. Fans of “Downton Abbey” and the novels of Edith Wharton may feel a kinship with many of the “voices” in these poems 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.