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Alice Friman
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Alice Friman's poems are among the finest
contemporary poetry has to offer—sustaining the dramatic language of
a "wildness that burns," cupping that fierce song in
graceful forms that hold and heal like lullabies. Here is the
embodiment of "truth and beauty"—form and content melded
in a "balance for weighing the soul." Myth and lyric
married, all affectation spurned, idiomatic speech rides elegiac
rhythms. For those who love poetry, this is home.
–Marilyn Kallet |
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In a poem on the death of a friend's daughter,
Alice Friman observes "How each heart-cracked moment / arrives
with its attendant image" ("Rachael Valentine"). The
fifty-one poems of Inverted Fire collect as many moments, the
attendant images arriving in language as carefully exact as it is
reluctant to insist or declaim. At the heart of each poem lies what
poetry always discovers when its attempts to speak the unsayable
succeed: enigma always and everywhere on this planet Friman calls "God's blue forsaken" ("Cardiology").
–Brooke
Horvath, Indiana Review
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[Friman] knows how poems need to attend to the
particular, how the natural world informs our self-knowing, and how
language needs to be charged with spirit and energy. Friman offers
insight to our world and into ourselves, while reminding us in
"Night Drive," the collection's particularly strong closing
piece, how always "[t]he dark surrounds." What we need,
Friman tells us, is to embrace such a world, with all of its
"broken spill of trash—its crockery, its egg shells, its
unloved dolly clutching at the dirt." With her vital language,
Friman helps us to understand how we can live in such a place.
–Philip Heldrich, The Texas Review
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Alice Friman's sensuous poems edify, surprise,
and amuse. She is a poet who can capture the pain of loss and chart
and route recovery with equal skill. Read.
–Diana Der-Hovanessian
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Love is here in abundance, but when "The
moon stretches back, / grins in her wide black bed" when looked
at through an airplane window, you know love is hard-earned and worth
looking at a second time to make sure it's not grinning at you instead
of smiling. Just when you think an image has been exhausted of poetic
possibilities, especially the moon, that most used and tired body,
Friman gives us the image above, as well as the moon with "her
white make-up," or "high white wig of bone."
–Paul
Bone, Northwest Arkansas Times (Fayetteville,
AR)
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The piece places us in a particular moment and consciousness and with
lyric force, through images that are free, wild, and new, celebrates
nature, offers affirmation despite the poet's awareness of loss,
enmity, and the quick burn of the dream that eludes us. The children
of the title become all of us, the particular universal. The
invocation of Autumn is like Keats and Shakespeare translated to our
time and to the voice of a woman who has "given birth" and
sees that a woman, too, or a thistle "spills her seed." The
calling out of solitude, human bonding, perseverence, and hope is
accomplished without need for abstract words. The music is masterful.
–Elizabeth
Socolow, PSA Award Banquet, awarding Cecil Hemley Memorial Award to
Friman's "Letter to the Children," which is collected in
Inverted Fire
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All these poems are clear and moving on a first reading, but further
attention is always rewarded. They are poems that stay with you, their
music and their grand humility giving continued sustenance. I first
read "Cardiology" a number of years ago, and ever since
then, in the winter, when I see a nest in a winter tree, I think of it
as Alice Friman's; the tree becomes a sweet gum skeleton, the nest a
dangling heart, and all the world pulsing with its hard-earned love.
–Helen
Frost, Calyx
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The authentic conversation and presence of the
concrete image both ordinary and celestial add to Friman's art....
This collection of poems captures loss, victimization, humor and
recovery in emotionally charged and elegant verse.
–Gilberto
Lucero, Puerto del Sol |
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