Pure

by Carol Frost

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?

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 1994

About the author

Carol Frost is the author of Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (Tupelo Press, 2014). She teaches at Rollins College in Florida and spends summers in upstate New York.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems, beautifully crafted. A huge influence on my own writing in the mid-90s.

Fury

And the whole night she had told herself to be pleasant
as she lay by the sleeping man, and she'd gladly have
listened to herself,
but as the enormous dawn sneaked into their darkness
and seized them in its paws, she found herself with the
old fury,
past her carefullest politeness. She saw she'd need
millennia to find a way
to comprehend the reason for the difference between
their early ideals--
a garden where plums and peaches grew well and tasted
wild
and they were unembarrassed by genitals--and what had
become of them.
This apple-pose. It was no good blaming God or Adam,
she knew, but she couldn't help herself--
Why hadn't the one spoken forthrightly and had the
other caved in?
Then, hardly allowing him to fully awaken, she said her
first sarcasm. Then another.