![Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
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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: | 9781556591662 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
Publication date: | 11/01/2001 |
Pages: | 240 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
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 |