|
Where the Horse Takes Wing: The Uncollected Poems of Madeline DeFrees
Praise for Where the Horse Takes Wing:
Where the Horse Takes Wing, Madeline DeFrees’ uncollected poems, published in her centennial year, afford a reader the unique opportunity to follow the arc of a poet’s vision for sixty of her ninety-six years, from the convent to the university, to her beloved garden. Madeline was world wise, and that wisdom infuses these poems. “Everything that moves, loves and is afraid,” she once wrote, and in a single line one recognizes her deep compassion for all creation. That said, she was also discerning and pragmatic—with a sense of humor. One sees it pointedly in her closing poem, “Pre-Need Planning”: “Caught up in details: bills for burning my bones/and delivering ashes. Cost of an urn/ for the ashes and a place to keep them – I lament this long distance dying. Why must I choose/memorial music when the melody //in my ear is Today?” Her life and her poems were both spiritual and spirited, and in that way her work provides a blueprint for the examined life. She is a role model for poets, and we are grateful to her literary executor and editor, Anne McDuffie, for so carefully assembling and making Madeline DeFrees’ work available for the world.
—Sandra Alcosser
From first poem to last, DeFrees reminds us that she is the master of craft: rhythm and sound composing a music which lends her poems a lasting reverberation. This thoughtful collection, compiled by McDuffie with loving patience, reveals once again DeFrees’ wide range of subject and form, enflamed in her later years by passion. Clear-headed and straightforward, many poems shine with her kindness, kindness which shone on me as a beginning poet when she helped me believe in my poems enough to move forward, to keep writing. As this collection demonstrates, she followed her own advice, taking wing with her usual aplomb and flair.
—Alice Derry
These as-yet-uncollected poems and fragments, left to us by Madeline DeFrees, have lit up my world like morning sunrise—as Madeline herself so often did. Let's bless her for these great-hearted gifts.
—William Kittredge
Reading this beautifully edited book of Madeline Defrees’ uncollected poems is like seeing a flock of rare and ruddy birds set free. The poems hold the vigor and courage of a poet speaking up from the shadows, from her double lives, from wind, water and body. As DeFrees herself has written, this is a voice that had “stopped looking / for [her] own likeness or the echoing names of what [she’d] learned in crossing” and “Suddenly we veered into sun.”
—Frances McCue
For Madeline DeFrees, her early cloistered life did not deprive her of experience but intensified her instinct for ordinary moments sprung from silence into poems of revelation. As she said on leaving the order, a willow tree is rooted, but this does not stop storms from making it wild in dance. So she brought fierce sensation and fearless insight to the page, where “the truest real / is the real that cannot be seen.” In these uncollected poems from her long career of lyric devotion, her prismatic attention storms our own lives.
—Kim Stafford
The poems of Madeline DeFrees are, like their author, very seriously playful. They have always been that way, as you will see when you read these previously uncollected ones. Of course she loved language; all poets do. But you get the sense, when you come across a passage like “swallows skate in razor turns / across the floodlit afternoons,” that the language loved her right back, just as seriously, playfully, and beautifully.
—Robert Wrigley
Sample Poem:
Woman With Coiled Braids
They blamed a horse for the scar we could only guess
at night small and shaking,
trying in our beds
to part those lengths of hair
and peer into her secret.
In our dry hours the shining green of oaks
declared the woman safe
who knew that far sweet rumors
slept their tides
through spirals at each ear.
Silk came to a rippling end when she unbound it.
We saw her huntress-robed
to net the moon,
the snare blown back
to show her perfect body.
The disc fell heavy as a hoof on pillowed clouds
her head supported.
We watched the crater fill
with the nightly grief of that wavering image
at the bottom of the well.
Nothing we understood would lift her streaming hair
our vision kissed awake.
The ghost came back
to swing from gloomy braids in the very tree
where sun had played our games.
A noose around the throat of strangled leaves
pale bones tossed up
on beaches of the sky. Kelp trailed the kite
we dreamed frail as paper
the ribboned sunlight bounced again.
(1975)
They blamed a horse for the scar we could only guess
at night small and shaking,
trying in our beds
to part those lengths of hair
and peer into her secret.
In our dry hours the shining green of oaks
declared the woman safe
who knew that far sweet rumors
slept their tides
through spirals at each ear.
Silk came to a rippling end when she unbound it.
We saw her huntress-robed
to net the moon,
the snare blown back
to show her perfect body.
The disc fell heavy as a hoof on pillowed clouds
her head supported.
We watched the crater fill
with the nightly grief of that wavering image
at the bottom of the well.
Nothing we understood would lift her streaming hair
our vision kissed awake.
The ghost came back
to swing from gloomy braids in the very tree
where sun had played our games.
A noose around the throat of strangled leaves
pale bones tossed up
on beaches of the sky. Kelp trailed the kite
we dreamed frail as paper
the ribboned sunlight bounced again.
(1975)
