Critical Biography

Alice Derry’s sixth volume of poems, Asking, will appear from MoonPath Press in the fall of 2022. Derry began this group of poems after her husband died suddenly in 2014. The poems express grief and mourning but also meditate on the state of bereavement—considering a life after losing a close partner of many years. The dead partner necessarily takes with him part of the living self. Facing the ghosts, reinventing a self, salvaging what is left, comprehending guilt—these are questions the poems approach. Throughout the book, the speaker joins a dialogue with her dead husband, keeping him close with her asking. Over 900,000 Americans have been claimed by our pandemic, more every day. In many cases, these people, like Derry’s husband, died alone. Our whole country grieves, asks the difficult questions. Even as answers raise more questions, these poems ponder the realm beyond answering.

Tess Gallagher writes of the poems:

Asking is what our entire country is doing—asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory—by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and re-approach the death and the love—its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning—this is what really makes this book sing.

Tess, Gallagher, author of Is, Is No

Kim Stafford writes:

What can you do with grief? How can you fill a loss so deep it takes your breath? These poems make of grief a companion, a teacher, a voice. The emptiness the beloved left behind here fills with necessary beauties and essential consolations. In poem after poem, the world testifies for the lost, offers scant remedies—just enough. And oh yes, I must leave a copy of this book for my own dear ones, after. It will provide them.

Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

Alice Derry’s fifth collection, Hunger (MoonPath Press, 2018) began as a contemplation of food insecurity in her childhood but quickly reached out to embrace hungers of all kinds. One section of the book contains poems about a family trip to Greece in 2007, characterized by that section’s title poem, “The Extravagance of Our Longing.” That section twice finished in the top 10 in chapbook contests. The book contains four more parts. It has a feminist edge, the second section titled “Stealing from Young Women,” how various hungers in the world take from the lives of others and from the innocent, especially women. Sections four and five address the many hungers of childhood and life as a mother, which continues in a different form, once a child is grown. Social justice has always been a part of Derry’s writing; several poems in the manuscript pay attention to events in various tribal histories, seen from a personal point of view. Derry’s father took her and her siblings to visit many, many reservations throughout the West when she was young.

Jane Mead writes of the poems: “Alice Derry’s Hunger is a beautifully observed, broad-reaching and ultimately political collection of poems—political in the best and necessary sense: she is a

woman, and a citizen of the world, and searches out the complexities and indeterminacies of what that might mean. From a childhood understanding of the genocide of the Nez Perce, to an acute attention to the natural world, to the way that different cultures maim their women, she is there, asking the hard questions. We don’t get any easy answers. I greatly admire both the force of intellect and the aesthetic nuance that Derry brings to bear on her poems.

From Molly Gloss: “Alice Derry’s Hunger is so beautiful, so dense with layers of meaning and the weight of the unspoken, so rich in its language and rhythm, that the book as a whole just frankly left me breathless.”

From Charlotte Warren: “By honoring her own feelings, she helps us face them in ourselves.”

Alice Derry’s fourth collection, Tremolo, (Red Hen Press, 2012, continues the strands of her three previous collections, discovering new ground and reaching deeper into her focus on our lives with each other. Beginning with the musical term, the book takes the reader on a journey of trembling which ultimately arrives at steady ground. Central to the manuscript is the relationship of mother to daughter. The book continues to explore the stories of Germans tangled in their past and poems about language itself. Tremolo also contains the languages of music and visual art, which need no translation, depicting how separations that make up a life are balanced by our connections to others, to art, to lives of courage and discipline. Tremolo was awarded an Artist Trust GAP grant in the fall of 2011. Judith Kitchen reviewed the poems in The Georgia Review, Winter, 2012.

Tess Gallagher writes of Tremolo: “Tremolo is a tour de force of vibratory power that marks Alice Derry as having come into her own as one of our very best poets. I am greatly moved by these narratives with their rushing crescendos, the way they sweep us into our own inner chambers. Derry possesses an exquisite emotional and moral register. She is unstintingly frank about our failures with each other while witnessing the tenderness, the give and take that let us cleave to each other.”

Alice Derry’s third volume of poems, Strangers to Their Courage, was published by Louisiana State University Press on September 4, 2001. Distilled from more than thirty years of experiences with the Germans and their language, the book explores the meaning of Derry’s investment in a population compromised and reviled. In addition to poems, the manuscript contains a lengthy introductory essay.   Strangers to Their Courage was a finalist for the 2002 Washington Book Award.

Li-Young Lee has written of the work: “Here is a book whose ostensible subject is the story of a specific European family, but whose deeper subject is the human family in general. Written with the personal life at stake, these poems achieve a transpersonal significance and beauty. This book also asks us to surrender our simplistic ideas about race and prejudice, memory and forgetfulness, and begin to uncover a new paradigm for ‘human.’”

Linda Bierds writes: “With clear prose and evocative poetry, Alice Derry has crafted a challenging book—a must-read for all concerned with the issues of human brutality and atonement.”

Mary Ann Gwinn reviewed the book in The Seattle Times on December 14, 2001. She writes: “Derry has a poet’s ear. The stories of hardship and pain . . . are distilled into spare, unstinting verse . . . . this is tough stuff, but beautifully rendered.”

Derry’s second collection, Clearwater, was published in 1997 by Blue Begonia Press of Yakima, Washington. Lisel Mueller writes of this book: “This is a rare and astonishing book and its publication is cause for rejoicing. I know of no one else who writes like Alice Derry. The impact of these unsparingly honest and intimate poems is overwhelming, as they take us inside the poet’s mind, into the actual and felt life of a mother, wife and teacher, a life that is as rich as it is contradictory and uncontrollable. The poems unfold unpredictably, in the way we think and speak, allowing interruptions, leaps, digressions and one-word sentences. As readers, we are not so much addressed as included and embraced. All of us are enlarged by the empathy and candor of this extraordinary poet.”

In a review of Clearwater which appeared in Calyx, Volume 8, Nr. 3, Paulann Peterson writes: “This is the voice of Alice Derry: clear as the clear water of her book’s title. In these poems that explore her life, it’s a voice that compels and informs, illuminates and bears witness, a voice that has—to borrow from her own words—’. . .come this far / into the unreachable world.’ Far enough for us to see, and hear, and give thanks for its clarity and poignancy.”

Derry’s first manuscript, Stages 0f Twilight, was chosen by Raymond Carver as the l986 King County (Seattle) Arts Publication Award winner. Breitenbush Books published the manuscript in November of l986.

Carver said of the poems in a Seattle Times interview: “I felt she was writing about real things, things that counted. Her poems seemed honest in their conception and execution—they made a claim on my interest right away. I would even say they made a claim on my heart.” Lisel Mueller writes of the book: “These poems, while they are reflective, are never solitary, because they are about human connectedness . . . . This is the work of a clear-voiced, clear-sighted poet, who loves the world deeply.”

Stages of Twilight was also reviewed by Stephen Corey in the Spring l988 issue of The Georgia Review. He writes: “Derry’s language is nearly always heightened yet plain, her project large yet simple: exploration of incidents in the human heart, in the name of survival and perhaps even betterment. Sensitive to both the uncertainties and verities of daily existence, she is constantly open to finding images and metaphors that might help her to capture such bedrock ambiguities.”

Derry was born in Oregon and raised in Washington and Montana. She holds an M.F.A. from Goddard College in Vermont, as well as an M.A. in English from The American University in Washington, D.C. Her poems have appeared in periodicals such as Southern Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, The Seattle Review, Hubbub, Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles. Derry’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize six times. Her poems have also appeared in a number of anthologies. Until she retired in 2009 after thirty-seven years of teaching, Derry taught English and German at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, where she had co-directed the Foothills Writers’ Series since 1980. She is married to Bruce Murdock, and they have a daughter, Lisel.

In l988 Derry was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission. A chapbook, Getting Used to the Body, appeared in l989 from Sagittarius Press in Port Townsend, Washington.

A second chapbook, Not as You Once Imagined, was published in 1993 by Trask House Boks of Portland, Oregon. Lisel Mueller writes of the book: “Alice Derry loves the real world so intensely that she trusts and delights in the authenticity of its smallest gesture . . . . She has made her peace with imperfection. These poems are acts of praise, not lightly won, arising from a truthful and noble spirit.”

In May, 2002, Pleasure Boat Studio of New York City released a chapbook of eleven of Derry’s translations from the German poet, Rainer Rilke. The book is now in its second printing. Gary Miranda writes of the translations: “Alice Derry’s renditions of Rilke’s short but difficult New Poems have an ease that comes only from living with the originals for a long time and letting them blossom from within. . . .Most impressively, these translations manage to capture the tone of controlled urgency that is unmistakable Rilke.”

In 1996 Derry was awarded the Washington Community and Technical College Humanities Association Exemplary Status Award for her work in poetry—both for her own and for the promotion of others’. Derry has been chosen four times to present at the Skagit River Poetry Festival in La Conner, Washington. In February of 2005, Derry was named Poet-in-Residence at the biennial conference of the National Association for Humanities Education. Her poetry and that of a colleague framed the two-day conference. Derry is an accomplished reader of her work and has read widely.