Palace of Twigs by Diana Deering

Diana Deering’s exquisitely crafted lyric poems unfurl entire universes inside small moments of time. The poet-speaker time-travels throughout the collection, revisiting early childhood and adolescence and moving through various ages as an adult, often standing at the threshold between the living and dead. To say Deering is a religious poet is not to say she professes any dogma or specific faith but that she is a poet who is ‘in this world but not of it’ entirely. Everything Deering observes in these poems—her ‘devotions’ rendered in meticulous, gorgeous images—even amidst elegy, becomes a way to bind the outer and inner selves, the material to the spiritual. These are ‘luminous’ poems, brimming with insight and feeling as they fearlessly ‘gaze into the next world.’

–Shara McCallum

Acknowledging the dignified reserve of twilight moments—birth, death, childhood discoveries—these poems’ crystalline language moves without fanfare, but with quiet luminescence. Deering’s work speaks of a profound inwardness, never solipsistic, always inviting. She taps the unseen seams of what keeps it altogether, mushroom colonies or people in our rural neighborhoods. This is the infinite life we have, this poetry states, right here and now, on this “wide answering earth.” I have waited for this book for years.
–Lorraine Healy, author of “Mostly Luck” and “The Habit of Buenos Aires”