Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001

by Madeline DeFrees

Overview

Contradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry of Madeline DeFrees. Her work is concentrated, multi-layered, spliced with humor and characterized by a passionate interest in every aspect of words: their literal and figurative meanings and associations; their histories, usage, disappearances, and resurrections. In her recent poems she approaches complex subjects with a new clarity, the dividend of a long investment in the art of writing.

Just as her poetry demands distance from personal biography and revelation, it is also deeply affected by her own life story, most profoundly her 38-year tenure as a nun. Throughout her writing career—from her early poems written under the name Sister Mary Gilbert, to her newest ones in which she casts a lifelong glance back through history and lineage—the need to reclaim individual identity is balanced against the relinquishment of the self.

From Going Back to the Convent

What was I running from
or into? The uneasy light of the senior
prom? Mother's dream of a a child bride, supported by
pennies from heaven? Or was it the writing
life laid as a sacrifice to a jealous god
on the tomb of the woman
I'd hoped to become?
Whatever it was, it will soon
Be over. I write this now to reclaim it.

A student of John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, and Robert Fitzgerald, Madeline DeFrees has taught generations of poets and poetry students, and earned widespread acclaim for her own work. Madeline DeFrees has taught throughout the US, including at the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she directed its Creative Writing program. She presently lives in Seattle, WA.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619321090
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	06/07/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Madeline DeFrees was born in Oregon in 1919. At age 17 she entered a convent and was a Catholic nun for 38 years. DeFrees is author of ten books of poetry and memoir, and received the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize for her selected poems, Blue Dusk.

Read an Excerpt

Scarecrow Gardens

Late-summer squash put out to sea
in coastal storms. All day, wet
leaves let go. I cut down three
sunflowers, a foot through the heart.
Their dried crowns counsel me to turn
my head and pierce the cloud.
As van Gogh understood, gold comes
in many forms: the best is art.

Galileo's Case Reopened (1564-1642)

Lie still, son Galileo, while we crack
the seal, undo the nails and let the bronze
repeal of history correct your bones.
And what's three hundred years, the long trajec- ories of moons, their lines crisscrossing like
a pinball game? Believe me, no one wins
without a slight distortion of the lens
changing the curve of inference and luck.

Timely as rockets bursting on the mind's
black earth, I plant the fleurs-de-lis of kings
over your grave to mark the faithful skull.
Inside the socket where the globe unwinds,
the shaken bell of every iris rings,
your brain flowers like a solar model.

Table of Contents

	New Poems 2001
	Going Back to the Convent	5
	Shackleton	6
	On Western Avenue behind a Horse-and-Buggy	8
	Through a Silver Screen	9
	Clematis montana	11
	Visiting Sunday: Convent Novitiate	12
	Almanac	14
	Elegy for Arnold	15
	The Paradise Tree	17
	Surgery Waiting	18
	Still Life	19
	Balancing Acts	21
	Memory Tract	23
	Metempsychosis	25
	Woman Locked in a Memorial Museum	27
	To Marilyn Monroe Whose Favorite Color Was White	28
	Scarecrow Gardens	30
	Peregrine Falcons in the Bank Tower	31
	Widows Riding Amtrak	33
	Sapphires in the Mud	35
	Hanging the Blue Nuns	37
	Double Dutch	38
	Vermeer's A Woman Holding a Balance	40
	from From the Darkroom 1964
	Requiem Mass: Convent Cemetery	45
	A Kind of Resurrection	47
	Nuns in the Quarterlies	48
	The Outsider	49
	Antique Convent Parlor	50
	Skid Row	51
	Long Day's Journey into Bloomington	52
	Matinal	54
	Whitsunday Office	55
	From the Darkroom	56
	from When Sky Lets Go 1978
	Baroque Lament	59
	The Shell	60
	In the Hellgate Wind	61
	The Family Group	62
	The Odd Woman	63
	Letter to an Absent Son	65
	A Woman Possessed	66
	Psalm for a New Nun	68
	Existing Light	69
	Driving Home	71
	Nights of flint and snow	73
	With a Bottle of Blue Nun to All My Friends	74
	Hope Diamonds	76
	from Magpie on the Gallows 1982
	Slow-Motion Elegy for Kathy King	81
	Portofino	83
	Extended Outlook	84
	Hanging the Pictures	85
	The day you were leaving	86
	The Register	87
	Phobias Incorporated	89
	Aladdin Lamp	91
	Sanding the Chairs	92
	Beetle Light	93
	Picking Youngberries on Mr. Harvey's Land	95
	Keeping Up with the Signs	96
	Gold Ring Triad	97
	from The Light Station on Tillamook Rock 1990
I.	The Geologist's Map	101
II.	Power Failure	103
IV.	Sounding the Ocean	105
V.	The Return from New England	107
VI.	Breaching the Rock	109
IX.	The Columbarium: Everlasting Consideration	111
XII.	Geography as Warning	113
XVI.	Counting the Winter Dead	116
XVII.	The Book of Sediments	118
	from Imaginary Ancestors 1991
	Stages of Family Life	125
	Honesty	127
	Grandmother Grant	128
	On My Father's Side	130
	Clare of Assisi	131
	Gilbert of Sempringham	133
	The Woman with Fabled Hair	135
	Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)	137
	Galileo's Case Reopened (1564-1642)	139
	Sister Maria Celeste, Galileo's Daughter, Writes to a Friend	140
	Modern Primitives	141
	The Giraffe Women of Burma	143
	Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins	145
	Greta Garbo and the Star Messenger	148
	Maria Callas, the Woman Behind the Legend	149
	George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross)	151
	from Possible Sibyls 1991
	The Stirrups	155
	Crossarms	157
	In the middle of Priest Lake	159
	Blueprints	160
	Living by the Water	161
	Beside Mill River	163
	Dialogue Partly Platonic	164
	In the locker room	165
	Spiritual Exercises	167
	What I mistook for heather	169
	Shadegrown Tobacco	170
	In the Whirlpool	172
	The Widows of Mykonos	174
	Hagios Panaghiotes: The Church in Tolon	175
	The Garden of Botanical Delights	177
	Acknowledgments	183
	About the Author	185