Living Above the Frost Line (review)

Living Above the Frost Line, a collection of poems by Nancy Simpson, initially brings to mind the poems of Stanley Kunitz, who loved his garden and made a metaphor of gardening and writing in The Wild Braid. Simpson's relationship with the natural world is just as alive as Kunitz's, and Simpson's look at nature includes not only a reflection of her own garden but that of the natural world around her. However, nature also serves as a source of metaphor in her poetry—metaphors for the many incarnations one goes through in life. In the title poem, "Living Above the Frost Line," the poet, who lives above the frost line and enjoys a few more days of blooming plants than "lowlanders" do, writes, "Living above the frost line I get a slanted view." This slanted view allows her to watch her elephant ear plant thrive even though the "experts" claim it cannot survive in its Appalachian mountain-top home. Simpson's slanted view also allows us to see life through the eyes of a woman who has raised children, left a marriage, and reinvented herself, all while staying in tune with the natural world that is not so much around her but within her.

Kunitz writes in "Touch Me," "one season only / and it's done." But Simpson, in "Leaving in the Dead of Winter," takes the "one season" of a life and shows the many living reincarnations of a woman's life. After all,

It is natural to live with decay,to notice the life of a tree and say we diemany times, mutable, all of us.Still, one must learn how to act,when to come, when to go.

The "decay" not only refers to nature and the self but also to a relationship. Earlier in the poem, the persona "smashes a red / crystal bowl" in anger over the end of her relationship with "the one man she loved." She goes on to compare the dead marriage to a state of rigor mortis: "The ground has already stiffened. / No one can live this close to death." The title, "Leaving in the Dead of Winter," therefore, takes on a layered meaning, as the "woman drives away fast" from both the relationship and from "Cherry Mountain."

Knowing "when to come, when to go" is what the reader experiences as the poems unfold in this collection. In "Night Student," Simpson continues with the metamorphosis of the persona who has enrolled in night school,

I see my face in the rear-view mirror,not a wife anymore, not a mother,a thirty-eight-year-old freshmanchewing left over cheese-crackersthat crumble on my fingers, star showersinto the floorboard.

The persona is overtaken by the desire to pull her car over and "to search in space above trees / where headlights do not reach." Her state of being is mirrored by the song on the radio, "Linda Ronstadt is singing about a broken lady / waiting to be mended." The poet, who is not just a night student, but now a student of the night, searches the darkness, and praises the natural beauty: "Star, one cut with your sword, / you have sliced the night open for me." This poem speaks of hopefulness and bravery following a major life change, not only facing the darkness but finding salvation within it.

The strong voice in these poems continues. It is a voice that is terribly honest, admitting to both weaknesses and dreams. In "Small Scope," the poet, having removed her shoes to go wading in the local lake, admits, "I need to gain perspective. I am trying / to see myself, though / it would be easier to see into asphalt." This same honesty is apparent in "Heritage," in which the poet has adopted a young boy, Nguyen Quoc Phong, who remarks that in his new Carolina home there is "sun and moon at the same time . . . / . . . different from sky in Vietnam." He wants to "know how separate worlds revolve," and the poet recalls how she "reached halfway / around...