Madeline DeFrees -- Reading 1 comments

A Catholic nun for thirty-eight years, DeFrees ultimately found that the experience thwarted her true vocation as a poet, yet her life is like a diptych: inside the convent, she sought words that might reach out, beyond a moralistic legalism, to touch the world; outside the convent, her worldly words reach out for a contemplative stillness—if not the blinding light of epiphany, perhaps the equally valuable moment of slowly-dawning wisdom. Whether she is writing a poem about what she shares in common with Marilyn Monroe or about the experience of eye surgery, DeFrees leads us into a garden of green thoughts—still points where time and the timeless embrace.

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1919 and joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in Portland at the age of 17. Upon receiving a B.A. in English Literature from Marylhurst College in 1948, DeFrees attended the University of Oregon where she earned an M.A. in Journalism in 1951. DeFrees taught at Holy Names College, Spokane, from 1950 to 1967; at the University of Montana, Missoula, from 1967 to 1979; and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1979 to 1985. She was dispensed from her religious vows in 1973. A volume of her new and collected poems, Blue Dusk ( Copper Canyon, 2001) won a Washington State Book Award and the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts award, and Image's 2004 Denise Levertov Award.

Bibliography:

• Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) poetry
• Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems, 1951-2001 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) poetry
• Possible Sibyls (Linx House Press, 1991) poetry
• Magpie on the Gallows (Copper Canyon Press, 1982) poetry
• Imaginary Ancestors (Missoula: SmokeRoot Press, 1978) poetry
• When Sky Lets Go (George Brasiller, 1978) poetry
• Springs of Silence (Prentice-Hall Inc., 1953) poetry