Elegies & Devotions

In Elegies and Devotions, Thomas DeFreitas wrestles with questions at the heart of being human: grief, loss, and the place of God in it all. With tender language and vibrant imagery, these poems are whispered prayers, shouted lamentations, and belted songs of sorrow. If God is love, then both God and love are present in this chapbook.

-Simon Green, poet

Love and grief, acceptance and disbelief, fear and faith - oh, these poems are so alive with their willingness to wrestle with the death of a beloved. With such open-throated, open-hearted beauty, Thomas DeFreitas writes of loss and how it transforms us, our relationship to our own humanness, and our relationship with God. With their raw music, these poems move me.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author, The Unfolding and host, The Poetic Path podcast

Thomas DeFreitas' Elegies & Devotions is a soulful tribute to his deeply cherished friend Jen, who died untimely. The first section, "A Garland for Jen," contains fifteen elegies - love poems, agapetic poems, in verse austere if not ascetic, reminiscent at times of Robert Creeley's poetry. Elegy II brings to mind the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and W. H. Auden's beloved "Funeral Blues." As I heard gasps of sorrow in the theater, I hear DeFreitas' gasps of sorrow from poems psalm-like and holy.

In the sequence "Where No Water Is," DeFreitas finds no peace in the Augustinian promise, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Like Tennyson, he looks into the void only to cry out: "my lord my god / you are the cross / on which i hang."

-Robert Waldron, author, The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins