Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001

Description

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.;Title Page; Not to the Reader; New Poems; Going Back to the Convent; Shackleton; On Western Avenue behind a Horse-and-Buggy; Through a Silver Screen; Clematis montana; Visiting Sunday: Convent Novitiate; Almanac; Elegy for Arnold; The Paradise Tree; Surgery Waiting; Still Life; Balancing Acts; Memory Tract; Metempsychosis; Woman Locked in a Memorial Museum ; To Marilyn Monroe Whose Favorite ColorWas White; Scarecrow Gardens; Peregrine Falcons in the Bank Tower; Widows Riding Amtrak; Sapphires in the Mud; Hanging the Blue Nuns; Double Dutch; Vermeer's A Woman Holding a Balance. Title Page Not to the Reader New Poems Going Back to the Convent Shackleton On Western Avenue behind a Horse-and-Buggy Through a Silver Screen Clematis montana Visiting Sunday: Convent Novitiate Almanac Elegy for Arnold The Paradise Tree Surgery Waiting Still Life Balancing Acts Memory Tract Metempsychosis Woman Locked in a Memorial Museum To Marilyn Monroe Whose Favorite ColorWas White Scarecrow Gardens Peregrine Falcons in the Bank Tower Widows Riding Amtrak Sapphires in the Mud Hanging the Blue Nuns Double Dutch Vermeer's A Woman Holding a Balance. From From the Darkroom Requiem Mass: Convent Cemetery A Kind of Resurrection Nuns in the Quarterlies The Outsider Antique Convent Parlor Skid Row Long Day's Journey into Bloomington Matinal Whitsunday Office From the Darkroom from When Sky Lets Go Baroque Lament The Shell In the Hellgate Wind The Family Group The Odd Woman Letter to an Absent Son A Woman Possessed Psalm for a New Nun Existing Light Driving Home Nights of flint and snow With a Bottle of Blue Nun to All My Friends Hope Diamonds from Magpie on the Gallows Slow-Motion Elegy for Kathy King Portofino. Extended OutlookHanging the Pictures The day you were leaving The Register Phobias Incorporated Aladdin Lamp Sanding the Chairs Beetle Light Picking Youngberries on Mr. Harvey's Land Keeping Up with the Signs Gold Ring Triad from The Light Station on Tillamook Rock i. The Geologist's Map ii. Power Failure iv. Sounding the Ocean v. The Return from New England vi. Breaching the Rock ix. The Columbarium: Everlasting Consideration xii. Geography as Warning xvi. Counting the Winter Dead xvii. The Book of Sediments from Imaginary Ancestors Stages of Family Life Honesty. Grandmother GrantOn My Father's Side Clare of Assisi Gilbert of Sempringham The Woman with Fabled Hair Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) Galileo's Case Reopened (1564-1642) Sister Maria Celeste, Galileo's Daughter, Writes to a Friend Modern Primitives The Giraffe Women of Burma Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins Greta Garbo and the Star Messenger Maria Callas, the Woman Behind the Legend George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) from Possible Sibyls The Stirrups Crossarms In the middle of Priest Lake Blueprints Living by the Water Beside Mill River Dialogue Partly Platonic. In the locker roomSpiritual Exercises What I mistook for heather Shadegrown Tobacco In the Whirlpool The Widows of Mykonos Hagios Panaghiotes: The Church in Tolon The Garden of Botanical Delights Acknowledgments About the Author Books by Madeline DeFrees Copyright.