Prayer to the Invisible
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Praise for Prayer to the Invisible
In her luminous 9th collection, Prayer to the Invisible, poet Diane Frank fully unmasks her wild and loving imagination. With a river-deep range in subject matter and voice, Frank guides us through terrains both difficult and joyous – her Jewish mother’s love of Christmas carols, a grace-filled visitation from a victim of ethnic violence, a ballerina-in-disguise on public transit, and many transcendent visions from dreams. Diane Frank is the wise and wonder-struck, barefoot-dancing companion we all long for in these precarious times.
— Prartho Sereno, Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, California
Author of Starfall in the Temple
Diane Frank’s Prayer to the Invisible is a gorgeous book of poems that rings with truth and beauty. Frank weaves together dreamscape and imagination, earthly treasures and astronomical principles. Accompanied throughout by music as metaphor, these poems invite us to find solace and remind us that wonder exists alongside grief. Prayer to the Invisible reveals maps in the stars, helps us navigate tragedy, and invites us to find home within ourselves.
— Emilie Lygren, Poet & Outdoor Educator
Author of What We Were Born For
In her new collection Diane Frank relies on two of her most beloved motifs: dreams and music. She employs them as talismans against what her mother, a marvelous singer, calls (in my favorite poem) the mishegas – the craziness – of the world. In a touching tribute to her friend who was killed in the Tree of Life shooting, Frank says, ‘Our prayers grow out of the shadow / of necessity.’ The shadow where, as Jung reminds us, the affirmations of dreams and music and poetry can contend against ever-impending doom.
— Thomas Centolella, Author of Almost Human
To read a Diane Frank poem is to return to beginnings. To remember how you were ever moved by poetry, or how you yourself ever wrote a poem. Her poems are that fresh, that mystically embodied. Darkness brightens, trees chant, the wind tells tales. We embrace each new book by her to discover she is beginning to learn the world’s secrets all over again and that they are not secrets. We move as in a dream where we never thought to find ourselves before. Only now we realize that this is where we are always meant to be, alongside her in such beautiful poems.
— Joseph Di Prisco, Author of All for Now and My Last Resume: New and Collected Poems
Diane’s work is extraordinary, evocative and crosses many dimensions. The images in her poems leap the reader from the personal to the transpersonal.
— Alzak Amlani, Transpersonal Psychotherapist
Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies
We can listen to Diane’s poems, her words, her explosions of beauty – and we also can eat them, as if they are Italian pastries. You want their exquisite taste to last in your mouth forever.
— Nancy Lee Melmon, Co-Author of Dreams and Blessings |
