Bethany Eden Jacobson

""I've never really understood the allure of cemeteries or gravestones, but when Bethany Eden Jacobson's new book, Ode To A Cemetery, published by Hirmer Publishers, came across my desk, I realized that I was looking at familiar territory. The book is a meandering journey through one of the most notable cemeteries in New York: Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where generations of my husband's family are buried. It's an unusual place, park-like with paths for wandering and meditating, offering beauty and inspiration. . . .The author discovered a certain magic on her walks, an oasis of calm and beauty, void of morbidity and sadness.""-- ""Aline Smithson, Lenscratch"" ""An 1857 directory for visitors stated: ""You are about, kind reader, to enter and explore a still yet populous Village of the Dead. Through its labyrinths of roads and footpaths- of thicket and lawn- you will need a guide. Take one that will be silent and unobtrusive, and not unintelligent."" Jacobson is that guide in her book Ode to a Cemetery. The Green-Wood she leads us through, however, is not the one of famous personages, tombs, and outward vistas to the surrounding city. It is an inward journey, a meditation on the passage of time - timelessness - a reflection on the liminal space between birth and death. We are lost in a landscape of memory among the weathered stones of shrouded ghosts and angels. There is something romantic and Keatsian about Jacobson's visual ruminations, made all the more evident by the accompanying text of poet Cole Swensen.""-- ""Brian Rose, PhotoBook Journal""