“Freya Manfred’s visionary poems range far and deep. I can’t remember when I have read truer or more urgent poetry. She shares Whitman’s American grandness of spirit, but she is a clear-sighted woman of a later age in our national experiment, “a naked voice, surrounded by continents.” These poems nourish me, too, with their evocation of the natural world we humans love together, and call us to “grow in hope with the earth.””

“Wonderful poems. Loon In Late November Water is my favorite (poem), though I’ve read and reread and like them all. “The steady millstone of my heart.” The grinding burden-bearing heart.”

“Freya Manfred’s Speak Mother is like Mt. Fuji rising up in those Hokusai landscapes, above just about everything else.I’m struck again and again by how much she is able to say in these poems, with her enviable access to true feeling and wild association, things many of us have felt and would like to say if we only knew how. Those shocks and pleasures of recognition stay fresh with each new reading, the earmark of profound art. I think, and have thought for a long time, that Freya is one of the great poets of our generation, and I know I’m not the only one to hold this opinion.”

“It is such a relief not to feel that she is lying or pinching other peoples’ ideas. I find the poems marvelous - her great sense of everything being sacred, and at the same time, somehow, really very funny. How can liturgy be a riot? But some of these poems really are.”