Dream Armor

Description

The poems in Dream Armor anticipate those in Imhoff's later collection---Whispers Turned Shrill. Dream Armor, as originally conceived, concludes with the poem While the light is ours, ending the collection on a high note. Writing from a life filled with both pain and joy Imhoff crafts her language, building phrase upon phrase, preparing the reader for a revelatory insight, often landing on a bracing final line. The poems appended at the end of Dream Armor included under the heading, "Anger, Truth, Premonition," express the anger, disappointment, and disillusion Imhoff experienced in her personal life, and, in a haunting way, portend the way in which her life would end. Diane Imhoff completed Dream Armor a decade before the turn of the millennia. Interred (2020) in Fairfield, California, she had wished to have her ashes scattered in the foothills above Chico, the northern California community she came to love. A braid of her hair was all that remained following her burial. On a bright winter's day in December Imhoff's former husband (They divorced in 2018.) reduced that braid to a small pile of ash and, along with her two adult sons, threw those remains into the northeast wind blowing through Billie Park in Paradise, California---one of her favorite places to walk. Those ashen remains live anew in "tiny bright pink flowers" as imagined in the poem Flowering Trees. That same poem prefigures one of the Imhoff family's last lovely memories of her. Three days before she died, Imhoff's eyes shone brightly as she, confined to bed, imagined herself directing, as a conductor before a choir, the trees outside her bedroom, as those trees, in her ecstatic delusion, performed for her in song. Only she could hear their voices, but her joy was evident. Her hands, ears, and eyes were learning the songs of the trees. In Dream Armor Imhoff explores both the pain people daily experience as well as the joy of the world as it sometimes is, and as it normally should be. Her language lyrical, her voice clear, her insight searing, Imhoff recognizes, in a way she cannot ignore, how far from the truth veers the socially acknowledged description of life she has been taught. She also sees, with a poet's vision, what could be. To describe poetically both a distorted reality as well as a vision the of the beauty and joy people could routinely experience reveals genius in Imhoff's language. In her poems she becomes a "weaver of courage, spinner of tales, dreamer of dreams" who offers to show the reader in verse "what we are here for," namely, to help, to love, to speak truth, and to recognize what life could be---a collective celebration of the beauty and wonder of the world and of each other once freed from our conditioned anxiety, apprehension, and fear of loss.

Diane Imhoff was christened Diane Estelle Marianno in Fairfield, California in 1955, on the western edge of the Central Valley. Her father was a part-time rancher (mostly sheep), and she spent a lot of time herding sheep, delivering hay, and hanging around in knee-high grass and cattle trucks. Married in 1978, her husband tried to take her elsewhere twice and failed. She spent most of her writing years in Chico, California, a little further up the valley on the eastern ridge. She earned her B.A. in English and World Literature at California State University, Sacramento and then backpacked through Europe for nine months, got an elementary teaching credential at Sonoma State University, and taught first grade for two years in Buffalo, New York, and then two years in Mountain View, California. In her late twenties she stopped out to run a Catholic Worker soup kitchen in Sacramento for a year and got arrested at the Pentagon once and at Mather Air Force Base twice protesting against nuclear bombs. At thirty she had her first child, and her desire to write finally caught up with her. She wrote continually since then doing journaling, autobiography, and her real love, poetry. She worked with Professor Dick Maxwell at Foothill Community College in Los Altos, California, for two years. He and the group of writers there made her a poet.