Blue dusk : new & selected poems, 1951-2001 / Madeline DeFrees.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

DeFrees, Madeline.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Poetry.

Women.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

xi, 185 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, [2001]

Summary:

Contradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry of Madeline DeFrees. Her work is concentrated, multilayered, spliced with humor and characterized by an 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.

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.

ISBN:

1556591667

OCLC:

47161088