The House Was Quiet, But the Mind Was Anxious by Nancy Dafoe

In The House Was Quiet, But the Mind Was Anxious, Nancy Dafoe makes a palimpsestic variation with the title poem that both acknowledges and redresses one of Wallace Stevens’ seminal poetic demarcations, thus signaling both her own adoption of purpose and a departure from such teacher – mentors. Dafoe’s purpose here is a heart-felt, poignant, unflinching reflection upon loss—indeed a series of losses that have caused her sensibility to uncouple from “progression. . . tempo and duration”—and in particular the loss of her son, an irreconcilable transition that has “opened the immeasurable” to her human dimensions. The final poem torques Jericho Brown’s new-born poetic form, the duplex, with the realization that “Love endures in ways you never imagined when you were still young.”  May these words and this vision hold lessons for us all.

–Carolyne Wright, Blue Lynx Prize, American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, and author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

When we are lost, let poets lead us. Grief, both personal and collective, turns most humans mute, but Dafoe’s a seasoned poet who keeps her eyes open in the dark. With intelligence and skill, she translates the inexplicable and unacceptable into precise, elegant poems that gift us with penetrating images, ideas, and moods—a lonesome frog, a multiverse, a silent house. These transformative poems show us we can pass through devastation into an altered life, “forever beginning anew,” like the galaxies and stars.

–Gwynn O’Gara, author of Sea Cradles, Winter at Green Haven, Fruit of Life, Fixer Upper, and Snake Woman Poems.