While Listening to the Enigma Variations
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Stellar Reviews
Review by Charles Rammelkamp in Compulsive Reader
Review by Wally Swist in Your Impossible Voice
Review by John Kooistra in Cloudbank 16
Review by Brian Fanelli in Pedestal Magazine
Praise for the Enigma Variations
Diane Frank's terrific While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, shows us a poet over a long and rich career who is undefeated by the acknowledged difficulties of living an affirmative life. She concludes an elegy to a friend by saying, "Shine your light into the dark world," and this is what Frank does in her poems. She's an ecstatic poet, who finds joy in music, dance, poetry, and, in general, in art itself. A book to have by your bedside when things seem bad.
— Stephen Dunn, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
These poems of love returning to love, and light
returning to light, are a heart gone supernova. Page by page Frank
burns a path to her readers' hearts. The alignments are profound,
the connections electric – from heart to bone, from marrow
to star. These are radiant poems, where we earthbound creatures
may find simultaneous escape and renewal.
— George Wallace,
Writer in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace
In this new and startling collection, Diane Frank's poems
transcend not just genres but entire dimensions. When
she speaks to J.S. Bach, she really means it and when Bach
speaks back, she listens — entirely — the way certain moths
perceive sound via their whole body, even their wings. How is
this accomplished? It will seem to come through the poems
themselves — their music, tonal qualities and subjects, yet
it goes even deeper as it pushes up like duende through the
soles of your feet. The voice is declarative, emphatic, spirit
driven. She will tell you, 'When a buffalo enters your dream, /
listen for arpeggio hooves, / the weight of music, / a copper
moon / above a vanishing prairie' and you will, you must listen.
— Lois P. Jones, author of Night Ladder
Radio Host, KPFK’s Poets Café
Winner, 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry: A wonderful work of poetic art. The reader is taken on a seemingly personal tour through a landscape of beautiful visions and a wide range of emotions. This is a passionate and heartfelt collection that readers can enjoy again and again. I look forward to more work from this immensely talented writer. Fantastic!!!
—Leon A Walker, Next Generation Indie Book Awards Judge
Diane Frank reminds us that we all inhabit this planet together, so it's better to honor life than take it for granted or destroy it. While Listening to the Enigma Variations comes just at the right time, following a few very difficult years. Her poems remind readers to sing and celebrate because we're still here. We're alive.
—Brian Fanelli, Pedestal Magazine
As the title of Diane Frank’s stunning collection of new and selected poems suggests, with its reference to Edward Elgar’s exquisite orchestral suite, music is an important theme throughout her work. Dance, spirituality, dreams, and love are as well. They all add up to profound wisdom and convey a sense of joyfulness.
— Charles Rammelkamp,
Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review
Tomas Transtromer once said that his poems are meeting places for souls. In this world where one does not always feel entirely at home, it is with a sense of recognition that
one enters a Diane Frank poem, with all its exotic quirks, and rather than feel it to be strange, feel it to be a habitable, companionable place of kindred spirits.
— Thomas Centolella, Author of Almost Human
Here is a book to treasure, to take down frequently
for no particular reason, a book to help us remember why we took
to poetry in the first place.
— Daniel J. Langton, Creative Writing
Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University
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