When I Was Young & Old: poems & prose - Softcover

Freya Manfred

9781947237513: When I Was Young & Old: poems & prose

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947237519 ISBN 13: 9781947237513

Publisher: Nodin Press, 2023

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As the title suggests, Freya Manfred's new collection of poetry and prose explores those evocative yet often illusive connections between experience, memory, and emotion. Often the poet questions herself, finds herself briefly unmoored and filled with a nameless yearning that crystallizes in images of the nature that surrounds her or of loved ones, now present or vividly remembered. "I want to laugh a liquid laugh," she writes at one point, "every gurgling morsel of me , cascading like water over singing stones..." Some of the lyrics―"In a Dream My Friend Sails Toward Me," for example―bring to mind the young Yeats, with their unabashedly romantic and fanciful imagery. Others deal with day-to-day events―planting a tree, eating dinner with her sons, swimming in the dark―from which a deeper resonance gradually emerges. The prose pieces counterbalance the poetic reflections, offering memories of childhoods games and the anxious and exciting campus parties of young adulthood. This panoply of glimpses into a life richly lived yet also filled with longing unfolds with the simplicity and imaginative concreteness of a true master.

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About the Author

Freya Manfred is a longtime Midwesterner who has lived on both coasts. She attended Macalester College and Stanford University, and has received a Radcliffe Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Her seventh collection, Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared in more than a hundred reviews and magazines and more than fifty anthologies. Her memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Award. Her more recent memoir is Raising Twins: A True Life Adventure. She lives with her husband, screenwriter Thomas Pope, in Stillwater, Minnesota. Their sons, visual artists Bly Pope and Rowan Pope, have illustrated many of her books.

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