The power and courage in the poetry of Deanie Rowan Blank's first full collection of poetry come as no surprise to this reader. The first section, "The Pulse of Grief" deals with love, illness, loss, and ultimately death without a trace of sentimentality. Mostly written in a narrative style that exactly suits the story of a doomed marriage, the temptation to depression is wisely put aside and we are told, "when relentless disease quashed his spirit/and there was no possible means of repair/he chose the kindest release and took it/freed himself from pain, endless despair." Music, travel, and painters become companions to this poet's life with her beloved Frost, Dickinson, and Bishop. Ireland and Sligo's secrets remind us of Blank's Irish father, her gratitude to W.B. Yeats, and the Yeats International Summer School. Between the famed mountains of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea, years ago I met and recognized a true fellow poet who would one day gift the world with her poetry. May she persist and thrive. -Joan McBreen's most recent book is Map and Atlas, Salmon Poetry, 2017.
Deanie Rowan Blank's richly exuberant, emotionally powerful poems are at once history and memorial, mounted like gemstones in time's setting and yet liberated wholly from mere chronology. They remind us how slight the distance from Long Island Sound to Galway Bay, from our youthful lives to our mature memories forever pulsing with the pains and passions of lives lived fully, nobly, marked now in rich and resplendent poetry whose obligato is inextinguishable resilience. The truth she teaches us generously about monarch butterflies (and much else) is no less true of our lives, all of us: "we gaze on cosmic flames of paradise." These fiercely honest poems lesson us eloquently in that transformative gazing.
-Stephan Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska, is the author of numerous books, including his recent book of poetry Refractions. His latest academic book is as editor of the 600-page book Romantic-Era Irish Women Poets in English published by Cork University Press.
