dark beds

Diana Whitney

Diana Whitney’s seductive second collection juxtaposes the conflicted emotions of motherhood and domesticity with the intoxicating promises of transgression. Fantasies fulfilled or imagined play out against the haunted backdrop of Vermont’s woods and fields, a landscape both harsh and magical, conjuring longing and grief, dissolution and repair. Here we see how time is reflected in our bodies, our children, our choices, and the natural world. Dark Beds is an anthem for the “sandwich generation”—tired adults caught between the demands of growing children and aging parents, yearning to reclaim desire and a sense of self. Sensual, elegant, and deeply resonant, these poems lay bare the dark beds of a marriage, a garden, a human life: the intimate places where truths are buried, exposed, and sown again in hope of renewal.

All I want is April on her back—
ecstatic creatures hatching in the ice pond,
green frog moon waxing like a come-on,
the bulbs busting up through dusty grass.

My task? Lay bare the garden bed,
rake off the winter weight, haul the ruins 
to the meadow’s edge, the border
of the well behaved . . .

“Diana Whitney’s poems are luminous and exacting, skating the line between danger and pleasure, domesticity and desire. ‘How can you savor what you have / when it demands so much attention?’ Whitney asks, as a caregiver, lover, daughter, mother, and partner. Dark Beds is a lush book—of the body and the world—that boldly reckons with the ways we’re inextricably tethered to nature and to each other.”

—Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk

“I love these poems by Diana Whitney. Dark Beds is a bewitching and enchanting mystical place in what Yeats referred to as ‘the deep heart’s core.’ These poems delineate the lives we plant, grow, and endure through the symphony of the four seasons. From the sexual urgency of spring and the critical overthinking of winter, Whitney’s stunning, beautiful, feminist poems lead us into the magical and sometimes dark natural world, where we find a mirror and metaphor for our wildest, deepest selves, a place where family is the immediate and universal, a way to find solace and strength in a brutal but beautiful world.”

—Elizabeth Powell, author of Atomizer

“The poems in Diana Whitney’s Dark Beds are nearly pyroclastic with ice, lunches for the children, dreams of what might be, and the action of being in the extra/ordinary throes of a meaningfull life—as a mother, a person, a poet, a mind-spirit. This imagistic and incredibly attentive, sensitive, and insightful book maps a maze of how to live and what to do . . . “what if why not what if how come.” These beds (of flowers, of asleep and awake) are of darkness and light, and fertile with matter—the problem that life ends and the substance of living forever.”

—Matt Hart, author of FAMILIAR

“As Whitney describes it, the natural world is a haven of beauty, a place of temptation, and a lesson in mortality all at once . . . Whitney’s poems contain a kind of breathless tension that draws in the reader and compels them through each page, caught up in possibilities and what ifs. This is poetry of confession, ripe and ready to envelop the senses with its passion.”

—Independent Book Review

“Dark Beds is a clear-eyed account of the push-and-pull at work on the speaker in these poems: young children, aging parents, the ebb and flow of marital love, and a longing for a life more expansive than the nuclear family. It is also a master class on the uses of rhyme and music; the reader feels these poems singing in her bones.”

—Literary Mama

Audiobook

Media & Mentions

The Indianapolis Review, “A conversation between poets Diana Whitney and Meg Reynolds” (August 2024)

“Poetry is a way I make meaning in my life, transmute memory and emotion, relationships and landscape, into something new, something I can wield. … I believe that poetry has the power to heal. Sharing a poem and connecting with even one gentle reader is good medicine. I want my readers to feel less alone when they read my work, to free some tension trapped in their bodies.”

Brookline Booksmith reading (full video) with Stephanie Burt and Anna V. Q. Ross (July 2024)

The Adroit Journal, “A Conversation between Shanta Lee and Diana Whitney” (March 2024)

Seven Days book roundup, “Sampling Seven Vermont Poetry Collections” (Margot Harrison, February 2024)

Electric Literature reading list, “8 Unapologetically TMI Books by Feminist Poets” (Marisa Crawford, January 2024)

Literary Mama review, “Exploring the Limitations of Motherhood” (Jennifer Saunders, January/February 2024)

Electric Literature interview, “Writing Desire in Middle Age” (Jennifer Berney, December 2023)

The Commons feature, “Coming into Her Own Creative Power” (October 2023)

The Slowdown podcast episode (698: “The Long Goodbye,” September 2023)

Read to Me podcast episode (featuring the poem “River House,” August 2023)

Independent Book Review reading list, “Fall 2023 Indie Books We’re Excited About” (July 2023)

Recognition

Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV) North American Poetry Book Award Second Finalist, 2024

“Whitney’s rich, sensual, formally deft and often erotic poems of transgression and fidelity in realms domestic and beyond remind us that there is always a place in the Zeitgeist for the lyric poem of interiority and beauty. Whether delivering snacks to hungry first-graders and then rushing home to vacuum glow-in-the dark stars from the Berber carpet or swooning over ‘rapture without consequence,’ this is a speaker who turns again and again to the natural world for its lessons of indifference and transformation…”
—Final judge Lisa Russ Spaar

SPD Bestseller, October, November, and December 2023