When Sky Lets Go: Poems

Literature & Fiction

DeFrees, Madeline

Poetry

George Braziller

When sky lets go

G. Braziller

This volume presents, in one piece, much of the careful and nuanced thought of one of the finest American poets of the twentieth century, and beyond: she died at the age of ninety-five in 2015. Severe, funny, mischievous, and astoundingly clear, these essays present her thinking on topics ranging from John Berryman's ghost, to prayer, to the stages of vision and revision, to poetry as a radical act, to the essential necessity of faith. It is indeed a geography and it brings to life DeFrees' singular and deeply affectionate sensibility.

Subjective Geography: A Poet's Thoughts on Life and Craft (A Northwest Masters Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Lynx House Press

Poetry. " IMAGINARY ANCESTORS is a search for self-definition that leads Madeline DeFrees to that fertile ground where imagination unearths the past in order to invent the present. She unlocks her complex family past, which becomes a version of American history; struggles with the crisis of religious faith in our time; and affirms a moving, personal vision of America's feminine poetic tradition. Her language is chiseled and penetrating, full of those marvelous, idiosyncratic perceptions that recall Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. Those who know When Sky Lets Go and Magpie on the Gallows will find IMAGINARY ANCESTORS a wonderful furthering of Madeline DeFree's art. Those who haven't discovered Madeline DeFree's poems will find this book a revelation" -Peter Balakian.

Imaginary Ancestors

Broken Moon Press

The Light Station on Tillamook Rock

Arrowood Books

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.

Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001

Copper Canyon Press

“DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, forms and a dense economy and precision of language.”—Poetry 
Brimming with characteristic charm and careful regard, Madeline DeFrees ranges in scope and scale from sonnets about Elvis, a poem-cycle about sculptor Henry Moore, and lyrics about cataracts. DeFrees’s poems are filled with daily encounters—birds outside the window, trips to the doctor, the plants in her well-tended garden—yet she brilliantly elevates these subjects beyond the personal. 
From “A Crown of Sonnets for ‘The King’”: 
“D.O.A.” 
Although the mourners know his fate is sealed they can’t give up on God, Who may come through. They cast about for something more to do: into Emergency, the patient’s wheeled. The human curtain parts. Aides leave the field to doctors who inject the heart and who start IV drips, then shock a time or two the organ grown so large with caring that it failed. 
Why are we working on this corpse? The nurse throws up her hands. The crew, shocked back to normal, admits discretion is the better part of valor. They’ll stare suspicion down, advise, rehearse the clothes that Elvis wears for his last formal. Up to this moment, blue was his favorite color. 
At 16, Madeline DeFrees entered a Catholic convent and remained a nun for 38 years. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has taught at universities and colleges throughout the United States. Her most recent book, Blue Dusk, won the Lenore Marshall/The Nation prize. She lives in Seattle.

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