In her new book Freya Manfred offers us a rich selection of poems from every stage in her career. Some are rooted in geography—California, New York, New Mexico, the Great Plains—others call distant memories and emotions to mind. Some describe day-to-day events—planting a tree, eating dinner with her husband and sons, swimming in the dark—descriptions from which deeper resonances emerges. "I want to laugh a liquid laugh," she writes at one point, "every gurgling morsel of me, cascading like water over singing stones." Hippie road trips, cranky grandparents, uncomfortable writerly situations, are all a part of her domain. Echoes of the young Yeats emerge, with their deliberate phrases yet unabashedly romantic imagery. These glimpses into a life richly lived but also filled with longing unfold with the simplicity and concreteness of a true master.
Over the course of her long career, Freya Manfred has published ten volumes of poetry. Her work has appeared in more than 100 reviews and magazines, and in numerous anthologies. She has also written memoirs about her father, the novelist Frederick Manfred, and her twin sons, visual artists Rowan and Bly Pope, with whom she recently collaborated on a children's book, Fumious Rex—The Outcast Cat. In The Only Poem I Know she runs the gamut from youthful cross-country road trips to reflections on mortality and celebrations of the passionate arc of long-term relationships. She lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, with her husband, screenwriter Thomas Pope.
"I'm struck again and again by how much she is able to say in these poems, with her enviable access to true feeling and wild association, things many of us have felt and would like to say if we only knew how. Those shocks and pleasures of recognition stay fresh with each new reading, the earmark of profound art. I think, and have thought for a long time, that Freya is one of the great poets of our generation, and I know I'm not the only one to hold this opinion." — Thomas R. Smith, poet, editor
"What stories she has to tell! What adventures she has been on! 'My constant desire is for closeness,' Manfred writes, whether this is a closeness to family or friends, to nature, to poetry, or to life itself and even to death, it is this intimacy that binds the book together into a whole. Grief and joy, humor and mystery, all belong together in this full embrace of a book." — Jim Moore, poet
