A review of Prayer to the Invisible by Diane Frank – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Prayer to the Invisible
by Diane Frank
Blue Light Press
Jan 2026, $20.00, 126 pages, ISBN: 978-1-4218-3601-0

“Drink this!” the first line of the first poem, “Appalachian Symphony,” in Diane Frank’s lyrical new collection exuberantly commands, and the final line of the final poem, “three haiku,” echoes the impulse of appreciation:

gratitude gratitude gratitude

Between the two we are treated to Frank’s image of the world, full of imagination and prophecy. Dreams and dreaming are a theme throughout Prayer to the Invisible, mostly as a visionary state of consciousness rather than in the aspirational sense, though hopefulness is indeed at the core of Frank’s vision. Some poem titles include “Dream Horse,” “The Dream Quilt,” “Arctic Dreams,” “Twin Dreams.” “Dream” is one of the six sections of “The Urge to Fly” just as “The Last Dream” is one of the parts of “The Last Sunset” and “The Embryo Begins to Dream” is a section of “The Quiet Time.”

Throughout the book Frank invokes dreams. For instance, dreams are all over “The Quiet Time”:  “our dreams began to fly / to the stars on Orion’s belt”; “an angel skin coral grotto dreamed of golden fish”; “in a dream / we waltzed on a polished wooden floor”; “a starfish is dreaming / turquoise in salt water.” “Midnight on the Town Square,” “Some Days You Wake Up Singing,” “Oracle,” “Winter Landscape,” “Ghost Boat,” “Ice House Blues,” “Light the Way,” “Cat on the Roof,” “Quintara Street,” “Rattlesnake,” “The Masks Come Off,” “Double Exposure,” “The History of Bees,” “Triptych,” “Hymn to Polar Bears, Icebergs and Stars” “Walking on the Edge of Everything,” “Something about Round,” “Flying to the Moon,” and “butterfly moon” all explicitly refer to dreams and dreaming, while others feel dreamlike in their narratives.

In the eponymous poem, “Prayer to the Invisible,” a moving elegy to Doctor Jerry Rabinowitz, one of the eleven victims of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, Frank writes:

When you came to me in a dream
from the other place,
I told you how much I missed you.
You let me know
you can do even more healing
where you are now, out of your body.

Later in the poem, Frank writes, “I write your name in the invisible / where you disappeared that morning.”

The invisible is a key concept in Diane Frank’s poetry and thought. It recurs in “Some Days You Wake Up Singing” (“ocean birds / continue their migration / to an invisible world”), “Quintara Street,” which is an elegy for her dead friend Mickey, who’d been a slave in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War Two (“When it’s my time / to walk through the door to the invisible, / I know that Mickey will be waiting…”), and in “The Last Sunset,” a poem whose tone is similarly elegiac: “everything you know / merging into an invisible world….”

Frank’s vision throughout Prayer to the Invisible is cosmic, intergalactic. She refers to Orion’s belt in “The Quiet Time” and “Flying to the Moon,” the moon and constellations in multiple poems, the rings of Saturn, exoplanets, the Minoan Oracles and more. In “Flying into the Singularity” she asks:

What if the stars you remember
were speeding through time
at a velocity beyond the possible?
Beyond the Milky Way.
Beyond the cluster of galaxies
where we swim through time
into the dark matter of the universe
and the chain-linked mysteries it holds.

And again in “Riding the Wind with Prayer Flags,” another poem for the memory of a dead friend, George James (“Your voice from the other world”):

I know there are other places in the universe
where we can create and uncreate
a solar system, a sacred hymn, our lives.
At times I wonder where I will go
after I take my sacred leap.

As we’ve seen, Frank writes heartfelt poems about her dead. “Scattering,” for instance, is a poem about tossing the ashes of a dead friend into the Pacific Ocean (“to see my sweet friend / as a bag of ashes labeled with her name / is hard”). Yet several poems that involve her parents bring a smile. “My Dad Meets Stephen Dunn in the Afterlife” is one.

Stephen is playing basketball
with then moon
and my Dad is playing baseball
with a bevy of meteorites,
his curly auburn hair
dancing out of a Merchant Marines cap
in my favorite photograph.

Her mom takes center stage in “Walking with My Mom in December” and “How High the Moon”:

In a night club somewhere out there,
my beautiful mother is singing
How High the Moon
in her black evening gown
with rhinestone straps that shine like stars
from the window of a Dragon.

Both parents and her grandparents appear in “Ice House Blues” and in “Five Tanka.”

Music, of course, is another important theme in Diane Frank’s oeuvre. Frank played cello for the Golden Gate Symphony for almost two decades and now does the same with the College of Marin Symphony Orchestra. The titles of some of her other books indicate the significance of music in her work – While Listening to the Enigma Variations, a collection of poems, and her novel, Mermaids and Musicians. In Prayer to the Universe poems like “Appalachian Symphony,” “The Oboist,” “While Listening to Mahler’s 2nd Symphony,” and “The Class of 2020” have orchestral elements, and “The Book of Disappearing” ends with the humorous image:

Meanwhile, Jacqueline du Pré
is playing a concerto at Carnegie Hall –
in her cellophane dress.
Everyone wants to pretend
it didn’t happen.

Ekphrastic poems, poems inspired by or about works of art, are also part of Frank’s work. “Midnight on the Town Square,” “Wings of Stars,” “Flame of Wisdom,” “Winter Landscape,” “Light the Way,” “Slow Awakening,” “Plein Air Painting” (“Birds fly out of the landscape”)  and “Upper Antelope Canyon” all take their inspiration from paintings or photographs.

But my favorites are the poems that involve youthful shenanigans. There are the poems about attending Hebrew school as a child – “Fourth Grade” and “The Labyrinth.” The latter ends:

Sometimes you have to forget your history
to keep walking through the mist
and feel your way in the darkness
by touching the labyrinth walls.

And then there are the poems about young love, “The Year of Kafka” and “Consensual Mathematics.” The latter involves the “hard sciences,” Math, Biology, etc. The young woman in the poem is having difficulties because she has not taken calculus. She goes to her teaching assistant for help. The poem ends mischievously:

They looked through a telescope
to witness the curve of time,
a maze of biodiversity
as she sat on his lap in biology lab
developing a private language of
consensual mathematics.

Diane Frank’s poetry is accessible and a pleasure to read. Her wisdom makes you stop and think about your own existence.

About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.