MY ONLY HOME by Freya Manfred

TO MY SON, LAUGHING IN HIS SLEEP

Since he was a baby
I have awakened in the night
startled
by the bell-sweet sound
of his laugh.
I am propelled,
cold, knees creaking,
across the cluttered floor
to his bed,
my face above his face:
yes, he is asleep,
and smiling.

Back in my bed I hear again
his high warble.
How I envy this boy
who is not mine,
who was never mine.
How I praise him
for making everything in the world right
for one moment.

from My Only Home (2003, 101 pages)

"Freya Manfred's poems are clear, bold and exquisitely tender. She is a strong swimmer in mysterious waters." Neenah Ellis

"I've always loved Freya Manfred's poems for their blending of wit and physicality. my only home is full of poems like that, but also brings into sharp relief another quality of her work-she is foremost a poet of intimacy. We are accustomed to poetry addressing intimate feelings between lovers, between parents and children, between friends; but many of her poems enter into a kind of elemental intimacy. They dive deeper, into mother-lust, into a physical bonding with water and earth, into the certainty of death, and come up having transmuted grief and fear into joy."
John Calvin Rezmerski

"Intimate yet unselfconscious, revealing of the strangeness of family life and of life on earth, Freya Manfred's new poems convey a shocking truthfulness and an ageless grace. She's a magnificent poet." Marisha Chamberlain
"Meditative, big-hearted, sensual, the poems of Freya Manfred's my only home unfurl like a single long silken filament of language spun out of fierce solitude and tender communion. Like the swimmer at the heart of her sequence, 'The Lake that Whispers to Itself,' Manfred observes the world at close hand, charting the signs of life, echolocating the primal impulses: 'A door opens in the water,' Reader, open that door, open this book." Sue Standing

"Manfred's subjects are family and friends and lakes in all seasons. Together, they are her 'home.' She gives herself willingly, fully, to them. And while surrounded by them, she is solitary. Beautiful with them, and apart." Elliot Figman

"What I like in these poems is that they are not floating around in the air or the intellect. The body takes them in. They are brave. The reader and the writer meet each other in the body."
Robert Bly

"There's such a range of believable emotions here, and the poet's voice is so engaging and resonant and true. This is a book of poems for teachers looking for ways to motivate students to care about poetry." Charles Woodard

"Freya Manfred is a bold poet. Her poems are tuned to the soul-shaking greatness of life, and to read them is to enlarge one's own capacity for feeling. In my only home, she writes in two distinct intensities, moving from passionately engaged poems of familial love to keenly meditative poems of natural observation. Both are incredibly rewarding, rich, and deep." Thomas R. Smith

"my only home is a lovely and moving collection of Freya Manfred's responses to a beloved place, written with humility, generosity, and a deep sense of responsibility." Ted Kooser