Double Crossing

Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island where she worked as a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant High School her teacher was Frank McCourt; later, at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she received her MFA, she studied with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Stephen Sandy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Jorie Graham. She moved to Britain in 1985 and lives in London. Her teaching experience, for adults and children, has included projects in London’s East End, a residency at Springhill Prison, continuing work for the Poetry Society’s educational programmes, and co-devising a Start Writing Poetry course for the Open University. She has been Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island University – London), West Midlands Writing Fellow at Warwick University, where she co-taught the Poetry MA, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Ruskin College, Oxford. Her grandmother was a child vaudeville actress; her mother is an environmentalist and her father a composer. This background, and a diverse range of jobs – Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies’ houses – all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with visual artists and performers. She has collaborated with director Rufus Norris and with composers Ian McQueen, Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip Cashian, A.L. Nicolson, and her father, Eric Salzman. Her operas have been performed by the English National Opera Studio and abroad, in Olso, Vienna and Düsseldorf. She is currently writing an original libretto for Buxton Festival 2005. She has received grants from the Arts Council and Society of Authors, and won a Cholmondeley Award in 2004. All her books have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations or Special Commendations. As well as new work, her Bloodaxe retrospective Double Crossing: New & Selected Poems (2004) includes poems drawn from The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford University Press, 1997), the pamphlet One Two (Jones Press, 2002) and the fuller-length One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press, 2003).

Eva Salzman is no slouch. She has a satirist’s eye and ear alert to the emotional and verbal cliché, the easy lie, and she can be gracefully ruthless. She can shift register from the formal and elegiac to an astringent New York sarcasm. She can shuffle the vocabularies of love and landscape, turn the grotesque poignant, the funny terrifying – a facility rare on either side of the Atlantic.