Books By Diane Frank

Swan Light

Swan Light

Swan Light is Diane Frank's sixth collection of poems. (order info.)


Praise for Swan Light

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, Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer in Residence

There may be those who think of poetry as optional, but Diane Frank's Swan Light does not support that thinking, since it addresses a hunger you didn’t know you had, first with trace nutrients of the soul, and as you progress, with the solid food of organic experience. Read, savour and be nourished.

— Paul Stokstad, Author of Butterfly Tattoo

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, San Francisco State University

In Swan Light Diane Frank has written an irrepressible and epic love story: a love story for lover, artist, parent, child, earth, heaven, spirit, body, and music; a love story for what we are forced to leave behind, and for what we are lucky enough to keep; a love story whose thread is the music of love found in the many narratives and lyrics we live while walking, writing, running, dancing, painting, and praying. This is Diane Frank’s most ambitious body of poetry to date, and I say “body” because the word “collection” is so inaccurate. This book is a whole, breathing the same breath as the author, and singing a meaning threaded with intricate images and motifs.

— Rustin Larson, author of Crazy Star and The Wine-Dark House

Diane Frank presents in Swan Light a finely wrought choreography of poetry that intersects with the music of language and the spirit of dance. In these poems are whole constellations of imagery, a resplendent aurora of words showering down to light up the geography of the page. If poetry should not mean but be, as MacLeish proclaimed, then these poems by Diane Frank truly are.

— Andrena Zawinski, author of Something About, PEN Oakland Award

Diane's poems may seem fanciful at times, but her language belies the truth. Her poems are about survival: finding love and community, creating a lifestyle that embodies art, winnowing the truth from memory. A survival of the soul.

— Stewart Florsheim, Author of The Short Fall from Grace

Reviews

As published in the Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Jan. 2013