This is going to sound weird, but bear with us: we think that poet Madeline DeFrees is the reincarnation of Andrew Marvell. Marvell, whose poetic reputation lives in the shadow of John Donne and George Herbert, is best remembered for “To His Coy Mistress,” one of the best pick-up poems ever written, but he was also the author of some of the most enigmatic and provocative poems in the English language, including his “Horatian Ode” and “The Garden.” Marvell’s ability to invite the mind and heart into a still place—“a green thought in a green shade”—is both cunning and contemplative. A visual equivalent would be the painter Vermeer, the subject of one of Madeline DeFrees’ greatest poems. 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.

Some of DeFrees’s work is featured in Image issue 41 and issue 61. Read an interview with DeFrees here.

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1919 and moved to Hillsboro at the age of four. She attended high school at St. Mary’s Academy, Portland, where she first met the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a congregation she joined after graduating in 1936. She was known in the order as Sister Mary Gilbert.

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.

Her teaching career includes four years teaching the fifth and sixth grades, six years teaching high school, and the remainder in higher education.

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.

Since her retirement, DeFrees has held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University, and Wichita State University. She currently teaches in the Mountain Writers Pacific low-residency MFA program in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Her eighth full-length poetry collection, Spectral Waves, is due from Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2006. 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.

She is the author of two prose non-fiction books, seven poetry collections, and two chapbooks.

Current Projects
June 2006