Dark Beds

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.