Sarah Dickinson Snyder uses the figure of Eve as a lens.
The Book of Genesis says that Eve was created from a rib of Adam, to provide a helpmate and companion. Many have pointed out that it was a rib that was used to create her, implying equality or, more pointedly, “equalness” in the eyes of God. The story of the fall is familiar – Eve is convinced by the serpent to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she convinces Adam, and they’re both thrown out of Eden. For their disobedience, Adam has to work the soil, and Eve gets pain in childbirth. And we know the names and stories of her first two sons, Cain and Abel, and the name of her third, Seth, whom she recognizes as a gift.
Beyond those basic facts, there’s no further mention of Eve in the Bible. In To Eve: A Book-Length Poem, poet Sarah Dickinson Snyder doesn’t envision what Eve’s life was like so much as she considers Eve’s mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her hopes and dreams. And she uses Eve as a kind of lens to consider some of her own life and the life of women more generally. The poem is less an imagined biography and more of a reflection.
It’s also an incredibly creative poem. Snyder writes with a depth of feeling that is often moving and always thought-provoking. Eve becomes real, a three-dimensional woman with emotion, hopes, and even a dream of seeing the sea. She’s attracted to her husband. She struggles with the murder of one son by another. She feels the lack of having her own mother. She can’t help but understand that all future mothers will “reach back to your hunger, your banishment, the birth of your sons.”
from To Eve:
Is that you, Eve, come to see
the garden of ferns & lupine
& lilies? Or the raised beds, the way
I pick the outer leaves of each lettuce head?
Have you come to sit with me again?
Mentioned only twice in the Old Testament,
you are a thin thread from the beginning.
How did you recover from one son
killing the other? Do you know
what I say to a god I don’t believe in
every night? Let me die before they do.
Did you wrap your offerings
around the son who lived?
How did you go on?
All the heaviness
of hold & carry.
You are there, here,
the first mother of us –
you, carbon, & stardust.
Snyder delves into what the story of Eve means to her own life and that of her daughter: “I might find myself if I could transcribe hunger, / listen to those narrow seconds again & again / in a black box I’ll never find – / that time you reached for an apple.”
Sarah Dickinson Snyder
Snyder previously published four poetry collections: The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad, With a Polaroid Camera, and Now These Remain. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and publications, including Rattle, Verse Daily, RHINO, Birdcoat Quarterly, The Mersey Review, and Solstice, among many others. She’s also been nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prize and was a teacher of English in middle and high school education for 37 years. She received an A.B. degree from Bowdoin College and an Ed.M. degree from Harvard University.
Reading To Eve is like having a dream. It has a dreamlike quality, a flow that carries you along as you join Snyder in imagining this first woman, this first mother. And this book-length poem (some 46 pages) ends exactly right, with Snyder imagining the mind of her own granddaughter as she realizes “this is how we are reborn.”
Photo by Luciola Correia, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Sarah Dickinson Snyder and “To Eve” - July 16, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Tina Kelley and “Field Guide to North American Words” - July 14, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Arlene Demaris and “Instructions for Use” - July 9, 2026
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