QUIET TREE by DM Frech

Like others who create art, or such things that a transactional world might dismiss as merely inconsequential, DM Frech ponders in one poem: “why should I care/ to leave nothing”? Quiet Tree leans toward those clearings where even brief lyrics might turn bits of remembered life, loss, and language into the currency of poems.

–Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia, Emerita

In Frech’s powerful collection Quiet Tree, grief and death take many shapes and memories appear haunted, how to cope in the ever-shifting present that refuses to detach itself from the past?

As the poem notes in “Chains of Flesh”: “Bound to chains of flesh I crawl the earth cast upon seeds of grief for I cannot fly cannot see beyond my shadow am forced to trust you will return over and over to find me not gone,” the conundrum to preserve or to let go seems impossible. How does one exist and make peace with loss and longing, with life as it is? No matter; from the moment we’re thrown in, these poems give it all in their deep and imaginative wonder, in the covered flowers, and coffin cards and gifts made of words.

–Kimberly Engebrigtsen