Spectral Waves

Madeline DeFrees

Spectral Waves, the eighth book of poetry by Northwest poet and former nun Madeline DeFrees, combines lyrical meditations on nature, art, and cataract surgery with sonnet sequences about Elvis Presley and sculptor Henry Moore. DeFrees also draws heavily on other poets; she engages Keats, Frost, and Merwin, among others, in conversational debates with the confidence and familiarity of a poet who has spent decades studying her art.

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ISBN: 9781556592409

Format: Paperback

from “Figures for a Carousel”

4. THE RIDE

                              …the centre of gravity lies within the base (and does not
                              seem to be falling over or moving off its base) and yet
                              having an alert dynamic tension between its parts.

Imagination rode the terror on the terrace behind
the Time-Life Screen, its figures
turning slowly to reveal an unknown face. Alert
before the aspects of that archaic rock, its
shifting triads of relation on a constant base, I
hoped to guess what moved them, the tension
of their limbs. Unlike those women who have always

loved the shape of horses, I preferred the bench.
The cracked melodeon wheezed by. The world got on
and left me drenched in sweat, afraid
to mount. I had prepared myself for flight. For fear
and pain. Until the day I saw the white
stallion with the wild blue mane. Blue, the color of
reflection. Of imagination. Of the sky. I began to

test the stirrups. Wish tight reins would fly and
move me to a sculptural conclusion larger
than my life. That shadow child, frightened, who rode
between us, eyes bluer than a blade,
grew to the shape your hands made on my shoulder. Your
music in my hair. Your heartbeat waking
in my sleeping body within the terrible air.

About the Author

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1919. At age sixteen, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, assuming the name of Sister Mary Gilbert for the next thirty-eight years. She has published eight previous volumes of poetry and two memoirs on her life as a nun. She taught at universities and colleges throughout the US, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she directed the MFA program.

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Reviews

“What she demands is that we enter a world alive with significance and be willing to wrest meaning from it, to see a parable in something as simple as finding a near-lifeless spider in the pages of a book… If you are willing to answer her demand, you will be richly rewarded.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Feisty and haunting, the poems in DeFrees’s tenth collection range from sonnets about Elvis to lyrics about cataracts, birds, and the plants in her well-tended garden.” —Ploughshares

“DeFrees, a former nun, imbues her poetry not only with religion but with a classical sensibility and a vast knowledge of English literature… this entire volume is built around seeing—the mystical and the actual, the thing seen and the memory of things seen.” —Soho Weekly News