rev. of Imaginary Ancestors by Madeline DeFrees
From Oedipus to Tom Jones to Luke Skywalker, our culture is full of children who need to discover their true parents. The quest for lineage has been the subject of sagas and fairy tales, and in her fifth full-length collection of poems, Madeline DeFrees adds a woman's sensibility to the heroic search for family, identity, and a place in the world. Daughter of an orphaned mother who freely invented her past and altered the present — she claimed descent from U. S. Grant and changed the Dutch spelling of her husband's name to glamorous French — DeFrees also recovers the selves banished by her thirty-eight years in a convent as a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Following intellectual and literary appetites, as well as spiritual influences and details of affection, DeFrees's new book, which includes material from her 1982 publication
Magpie on the Gallows, seamlessly charts the shape of a single, examined life.
The poems offer characters and situations as complex as a family tree, succinctly rendered without sacrificing precision or wit. "Honesty" describes a distant Grandma who "hated the pope, Peter's bark/worse than Eve's famous bite." Defrees strikingly evokes both fear and longing as she follows a muskrat's "pale whiskery scramble" on a visit to an uncle plagued by depression, father of the piano-playing cousin "I might marry later" in "Uncle Matt's Farm in Cherry Grove." Sex and madness, art and nature, radiate from the "brown/coat, red where the frayed/light fell and the natural musk."
Other poems offer homage to "Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins," paired on a "formal cruise"; to Moore and Bishop in "Marianne Moore"; to George Eliot and Teresa of Avila; as well as to more worldly movers and shakers like Andrew Carnegie and Galileo. DeFrees's unacknowledged literary ancestor might be Thomas Hardy, whose passionate irony and dramatic lyricism she shares.
Imaginary Ancestors is a fully realized work, as thoughtful and shapely as the mind revealed within its pages.
