The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

CAROL FROST

Ø Carol Frost 388 * * * Just because we will not fit into the uniforms of photographs of you at twenty-one does not mean you can disown us. We are your sons, America, and you cannot change that. When you awake, we will still be here. 1975 A comparatively early Vietnam War poem, still raw with emotion, “A Relative Thing” offers a soldier’s view of the war. Ehrhart expresses anger about the wartime horrors he has seen and about the lack of understanding soldiers received from the homefront. Compare this poem to the later Vietnam War poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Gerald McCarthy, Ray A. Young Bear, and Bao-Long Chu. CAROL FROST b. 1948 Carol frost creates poems of a sometimes painful beauty, poems that often dramatize moments of displacement or metamorphosis, when the observer’s sense of reality undergoes a profound and disturbing challenge. In some cases, as in her poem of the dream life, “A Good Night’s Sleep,” that change might be temporary. In others, such as “Pure,” the change might be forever. Frost’s poems are often set in nature. However, as in the work of Elizabeth Bishop (whose presence is reflected in “The Poet’s Black Drum”), Frost’s poems inhabit a natural world haunted by human consciousness and—more so than in Bishop’s— haunted also by the lingering or unsatisfied spirits of the past, spirits who make their presence felt in poems such as “Chimera” and “Lucifer in Florida.” Born Carol Perrins in Lowell, Massachusetts, she lived as a child for a year in her mother’s native city of Vienna. She studied French literature and art at the Sorbonne before earning a bachelor’s degree at the State University College at Oneonta, New York. She married the poet and jazz drummer Richard Frost in 1969. After receiving a master’s from Syracuse University, Frost began teaching in 1981 at Hartwick College, where she became writer-in-residence and founded Chimera Ø 389 the Catskill Poetry Workshop. She now holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Many of Frost’s poems explore poles of north and south, their settings either in the rural farming and hunting culture of upstate New York or in the shorelines and fishing lore of coastal Florida. In recent years, confronted by her mother’s growing dementia, Frost has examined, in such poems as “(For the ones,” the challenging alterations in consciousness experienced by the elderly in the grip of Alzheimer’s, and even here her poetry is marked by the freshness, surprise, acuity of perception, and resilience in the face of loss that are among its signal characteristics. further reading Carol Frost. Chimera. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1990. — — — —. I Will Say Beauty. Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 2003. — — — —. Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems. Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 1998. — — — —. Pure. Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 1994. — — — —. The Queen’s Desertion. Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 2006. Chimera By the verge of the sea a man finds a gelatinous creature, parching, thick as a shoe, its head a doubtful dark green that leans toward him as he bends near in some dark wonderment of his own. The sky is haunted by pure light, the sea a rough mixture of blue, and green, and black. Suddenly he hears the air rent with loud cries and looks to see pelicans on the piers raising their wings then falling, changing shape to dive into the sea. He thinks of Bosch’s rebellious angels1 changing shape as they are pursued out of the immaculate sky. Who are they? Angels who accept the hideous and monstrous. Fallen, they make up a nightmare fauna. Say the sea is to be questioned. Below the bounds of this estate, through rainbowed cold, the rockheaded and cored of bone, the chimera our madness does not cease to reinvent and which we dare not think alive, crawls in a thick ooze. Yet even this one, torn to the plain insides and leaking dyes, 1. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (ca. 1504), a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Ø Carol Frost 390 exudes a gentle unrest of the soul. Is it not good? The man pauses, looks around—the sea undulated, sharpening and smoothing all the grooves that history has graven on the sand— then he puts his hands under the terrible flesh and heaves it as far as he can back into...