Pure

by Carol Frost

Overview

Pure is a fierce, passionate series of meditations on experience and consciousness, morals and customs, and on the natural world that surrounds and shapes human life. What is “pure” is the intensity of Carol Frost’s gaze?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810150041
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	05/11/1994
Series:	Phenomenology and Existential
Edition description:	1
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.30(d)

Editorial Reviews

Frost ( Chimera ) introduces this new collection, her seventh, with a ruminative poem, ``Fate,'' asking the reader to imagine fishing for trout in the twilit shadows as the mind ``learns / to drift, to take in the slightest signs, as if there's / already begun / under the surface what will come to pass.'' Fate and the natural world intersect in the book as a whole, producing exacting poems with a serious tone and a clarity of vision that, to Frost's credit, is not romanticized. The title poem, exemplary of this achievement, tells the story of a man who mistakenly shoots his son instead of a deer and ``only had left to him his pure hunter's sense, still clean / under his skin.'' Frost's mature voice, revealing the wisdom of passage, leads us along the path of experience. Her style is unnervingly close to the bone as she tackles, especially in the second part of the book, central issues like mortality, memory: ``I imagine myself in skies past this one, / for there's no one anyplace who isn't secretly / going away.'' Through her patient dissection of the mysteries of nature, she comes to conclusions that leave us with a prophetic sense of darkness. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Frost's work is difficult without seeming elaborate, philosophical without seeming pretentious, and unfashionable in its refusal to move far from home. She is a poet who knows how to listen and observe and who has a deep bond with her rural surroundings. In many of these poems, nature is so acutely observed that it takes on a surreal, sinister quality; about butterflies, she writes: ``modern poets dislike them. But they are not frail./ Think of their long thin hearts pumping yellow blood, their concealed poisons,/ and their pheromones and colors which are sexual--they grow transparent/ from sex'' (``Papilio''). Hunting and fishing are favored subjects; the title poem describes the excruciating moment right after a hunter has accidentally shot and killed his son. In another piece, the narrator recounts having killed a deer and heard ``the night wind blowing through her fur/ heard riot in the empty head.'' For all poetry collections.-- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

Library Journal

"Carol Frost's powerhouse poems . . . are saturated with urgency. Their special province is the violence reflected in our innermost selves, where conscience is often defeated by knowledge of a world that is not only terrifying and beautiful, but highly deterministic." —The Gettysburg Review


"The poetry in Pure is an uncommon achievement—stark, yet finely wrought. Frost's is a vital, original, and necessary voice in a world crowded with formula poets." —Chelsea


"Through her patient dissection of the mysteries of nature, she comes to conclusions that leave us with a prophetic sense of darkness." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher