Daphne Lifts Up

Review by Gail E. Hemmann

CALYX Press

4/2026

Donna L. Emerson’s Daphne Lifts Up captures the moment that a woman’s voice rises into song—and soars. This luminous and deeply rooted collection of fifty-seven poems is alive with attention and the music of feeling. It reads as both a biography of a family and ultimately a concerto of a poet watching, and listening, across decades. Emerson’s seventh volume of poetry gathers work that is confessional without self-pity, wide-ranging, highly musical, and grounded in the natural world’s restorative powers. With her poetic ear, what could have been a life of casual words is registered instead as music.

A Poet’s Ear for the Everyday

The first section, Comforts, sets the tone for all that follows: an invocation of the everyday as sacred space. The opening poem, “Hummingbird Couple,” begins with a marvel of motion and stillness, the poet astonished by the birds’ nearness. The hovering hummingbird seems to stand in as a metaphor for creativity itself, establishing Emerson’s sense of wonder: the bird is light and magical, and the poet finds herself wishing, perhaps of the muse: if he / would only stay. Like the natural world, Emerson’s poetry is grounded and meant to sustain in its tenderness and attention.

Emerson’s diction is everyday but musical, her rhythms guided by a common heartbeat-like pulsing. In the astonishing “I Was Raised on Love,” she writes of a father rarely there, capturing both tenderness and ache in the same breath. Ironically, on his deathbed, she mentions it’s the father I’d hoped to see / up close, someday. In her poems on memory and love, this type of haunting end image is powerful—the feeling of a song ending with a sudden, punctuating drumbeat. In another ending moment, her distant father sings to her in a moment so rare it is remembered as cathedrals of sunlight.

Family, Loss, and the Music of Memory

Again and again for Emerson, love is a chorus. The emotional gravity of the book really centers on family. She traces her early life: there’s the father’s early brightness and distance and a mother’s fierce artistry tempered by illness. Pieces such as “At Four and Thirty” and “Before Mother Died” form a kind of symphony of remembrance: each phrase loyal, attuned to the complexities of love. “Before Mother Died” also ends with a poignant moment as she slowly reckons with her mother’s instructions to pack up boxes of her posthumous things. Her mother’s boxes take on increasingly heavy metaphorical weight. The family’s life goes on, until a lonely end couplet notes:

We won’t be carrying these boxes away.

They protect the foundation of the house.

In tandem with describing her family upbringing, she also hints at early musical formation as a part of her heritage: in “Rhapsody and Boogie-Woogie,” her mother’s piano becomes a spiritual altar. Her mother played it as if she knew every measure from birth. When her mother’s silence replaces the songs, grief fills the space where music once lived. But Emerson notes, sitting down to play it later on her own, she wants to play her music. Make it my music with Beethoven and Elvis in the bench. It’s clear that musical upbringing may have become tender but did not go away, as Emerson recycles it back through poetic retellings as an adult.

Despite early loss, Emerson’s spirit and imagination are indeed buoyant. The book’s title poem, “Daphne Lifts Up,” reimagines the mythic nymph not as fleeing but as transforming, her body turning to tree, her voice to wind. It’s a perfect metaphor for Emerson’s art. She transforms daily realities, taken together, into a continuous song.

The father I’d hoped to see up close, someday.

Bearing Witness Through the Decades

Emerson’s career as a clinical social worker shapes her compassion and brings some amazing “tracks” to the book’s playlist. “Before AIDS Was a Word,” “Long Distance,” and “A Day’s Work” chronicle care and loss with restraint and intimacy. The poems of the 1970s and 1980s, steeped in social upheaval, stand beside the quieter later meditations on illness and aging. “Before AIDS Was a Word” ends with the image of a blanket on a patient, which covers, but does not warm, perhaps pointing to the futility of medical systems and her limited ability to help his condition. Her poems of cultural documentation are powerful and lend depth, anchoring in time and scope the author’s experiences. Much as songs of protest did, she honors cultural upheaval moments in her poetic mix.

As for many poets, coming-of-age poems dealing with love get steady play. An early love ode, “A Boy Named Ned,” is a standout. She and Ned briefly date, but they are never part of each other’s “forever.” She notes how she’s only fleeting in his life, as they go on to marry other people and have separate lives. He calls her, battling disease at the end of life, and she says, I think he called me because I knew about not forever….

This moment is highly evocative. Then Ned, in an act of wanting to “remember” an alternate life he lived, finds that she plays along. She says, He called me Honey. I told him I remembered everything. This poem is of the book’s most subtle invocations of the unusual curves of humans’ need for love.

The Craft of Listening

Formally, the poems embrace the lyrical poem line’s flexibility; Emerson’s control of pacing and phrasing is musical, not mechanical. Each poem feels composed by ear as much as by eye. Her verse breathes. The short lines create syncopation; pauses fall like rests in a measure. She turns words into notes. At times she plays with rhyme and repetition of sound, but it is image that pulls the stories through the lyric arc of poems.

This union of sound and sense runs deep. Even when she writes of darkness—AIDS, pandemic, or parental death—the cadence lifts. Like her mother at the piano, Emerson transforms discipline and emotion into art—taking the dissonant notes of living and playing them until they resolve. The warm pulse of love offers solace as a steady chorus.

A Voice Both Constrained and Universal

As a woman writer, Emerson experiences life circles sometimes transcribed by parental roles, reproductive cycle health scares, male arrogance, and even professional caregiving duties in social work. She also transcends these imposed realities with sweeping, sonata-type reflections. She calls into power the work of Debussy, Cassatt, and others to understand her daily life fully. There’s a gloss on Emerson’s work that will never let it be quotidian. Readers drawn to poets such as Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, and Lucille Clifton will find in Emerson a kindred attention to the intersection of nature and voice.

He called me Honey. I told him I remembered everything.

Words into Song

By the book’s final pages, Emerson has gathered decades of joy and sorrow into one sustained tone. The last poem, “Belting Out Beethoven,” is both literal and symbolic:

I sing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as I drive home,

try to land the notes.

This becomes a perfect end for the poet herself and an urge to all of us to keep singing. Daphne Lifts Up is about taking the words of a human life—family, work, history, loss—and making music from them. The poems search for pitch, for harmony, until language itself begins to sing. The attention to this matter is palpable as the stories she weaves together, giving the book energy. In Emerson’s world, the act of noticing becomes the act of praise.

Emerson lifts the ordinary into lyric, letting her words rise like breath to melody at many key moments. The final resonance lingers: a voice sure of its notes, still belting out Beethoven against the mechanical noise of the world.

–Gale E. Hemmann is a writer and poet living in the Olympia, WA, area. She has Master’s in writing from Pacific and a BA from Smith College. She just completed her first manuscript, The Mannequins, a novel in sonnets. A bibliophile, she is a frequent contributor to Rain Taxi and ForeWord Books, teaches nonprofit grant writing, and works with Annie Finch in meter circles as sacred (metrical) time, where the waves meet the shore by music.

What delight awaits the reader of Donna L. Emerson’s newest collection, Daphne Lifts Up. In these 57 poems, Emerson delineates moments of exquisite beauty and tenderness as well as glimpses of life’s casual cruelties. The effect is stunning; for example, “I Was Raised on Love” describes the speaker’s father as “a loving man . . . rarely there,” plays this contradiction out poignantly and readies us for a later poem (“In the Blue Room”) where the poet prepares herself and her father for his death. The book has a chronological frame within an emotional one. From poem to poem, the emphasis is on the poet’s eye and heart which work together to praise and ultimately accept all that life offers—pastures, forests, homes, water, family. There is fire that destroys, but there is fire that brings growth. The imagery is rich and the settings evocative. This is poetry that welcomes all and provides a tough and durable comfort.

–Deirdre Neilen, PhD, Editor, The Healing Muse

This Daphne asserts her power. She is not a victim of misogyny. I see her sense of self, her power to endure, and her bond with those who might sometimes think they are using her. Without her, who would they even be?

I love how Donna Emerson tells hard truths without bitterness. I am deeply impressed about the way the land itself comes alive in these poems. No matter how intellectual and wise she can be, she is so of this earth. I mean this as a compliment, the biggest compliment I know.

–Susan Bono, author, What Have We Here: Essays About Keeping House and Finding Home www.susanbono.com

Donna Emerson is an extraordinary poet of ordinary life, revealing intimate details of her and her family’s relationships. Her poems are intensely personal, yet resonate with us all. The language is spattered with color; music, art and nature trigger emotions throughout. It’s a collection of recent poems and some of her best work over a number of years. Family is the constant thread that ties the wide-ranging “Daphne Lifts Up” together. “She Lay Asleep, Wearing Oxygen” recounts the scene during Emerson’s mother’s passing, told with a seasoned reporter’s feel for detail and the power of an accomplished poet’s craft.

–Geoffrey Link, Editor and Publisher of the San Francisco Study Center Press

Grounded firmly in the realm of human relationships, Donna Emerson’s powerfully personal poems bring us into the life of the heart and heart-held memory, offering intimate depictions of a world alive with family and friends. Of her many poems about her mother, “She Lay Asleep,” is an especially poignant account of her mother’s illness and death. While wisely reminding us that loss waits at the last shore of love, the poems of Daphne Lifts Up vividly celebrate a life of enduring connections.

–Elizabeth C. Herron, PhD, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2022-2

Daphne Lifts Up

by Donna Emerson

Full-length, paper

Cover watercolor by Barbara Marlin-Coole

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SYNOPSIS

Daphne Lifts Up is certainly about Daphne, who appears half way through this book of journeys. She is not the Daphne you may have met before. She appears to like trees, especially the bay laurel. She is accustomed to being chased. Her travel through life includes abundant, verdant nature, lifelong exposure to the light and dark of many relationships, giving birth, embracing life, and accompanying many to natural deaths. Music plays a major role along the way, whether among birds, trees, sheep, water, or within the family. Singing, telling stories, mother’s piano, her own, listening to voices, songs of her children, filling herself with Nin, Cassatt, and Beethoven.

BIOGRAPHY

Donna divides her time between Petaluma, California, and her family homestead near Ithaca, New York. Retired from teaching at Santa Rosa Jr. College and her clinical social work practice, her recent poetry publications include La Pressa, The Paterson Literary Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West. Her chapbooks: This Water, 2007, Body Rhymes, 2009, Wild Mercy, 2011, and Following Hay, 2013. Her poetry books are The Place of Our Meeting (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Beside the Well (Cherry Grove Collections. 2019). And now, Daphne Lifts Up (Finishing Line Press, 2025).

Donna has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize, one for "Best of the Net," two nominations for the California Book Award (Body Rhymes, 2009, The Place of Our Meeting, 2018), five awards from the annual Allen Ginsberg Contests, and numerous regional awards for her poetry, creative non-fiction, and prose. Many of her poems appear in journals or anthologies with her black and white or color photography. Anais Nin used Donna's portraits of Anais in her late diaries and press coverage in the New York Times.

Donna has taught poetry to elementary school children and made it part of her community college classrooms (1990-2015). She worked as a volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients at a residential facility to help them create individual and group poems and served as Board member and Events Chair for the Marin Poetry Center (2012-2014). 

Introducing…