When I Was Young & Old: Poems & Prose

As the title suggests, Freya Manfred's new collection of poetry and prose explores those evocative yet often illusive connections between experience, memory, and emotion. Often the poet questions herself, finds herself briefly unmoored and filled with a nameless yearning that crystallizes in images of the nature that surrounds her or of loved ones, now present or vividly remembered. "I want to laugh a liquid laugh," she writes at one point, "every gurgling morsel of me, cascading like water over singing stones..." Some of the lyrics--"In a Dream My Friend Sails Toward Me," for example--bring to mind the young Yeats, with their unabashedly romantic and fanciful imagery. Others deal with day-to-day events--planting a tree, eating dinner with her sons, swimming in the dark--from which a deeper resonance gradually emerges. The prose pieces counterbalance the poetic reflections, offering memories of childhood games and the anxious and exciting campus parties of young adulthood. This panoply of glimpses into a life richly lived yet also filled with longing unfolds with the simplicity and imaginative concreteness of a true master.