Early Echoes

by Carol Frith

In this collection, the “early echoes” are the isolating sirens of patrol cars and ambulances in the darkness, along with poems of morning glories in urban alleyways, of seedy coffee shops and neglected stone fountains in vacant back yards. These poems explore the present by reworking it in terms of the past. Sonnets and villanelles alternate with free verse as present and past subsume and modify the solitary echoes of experience lived and reworded, abbreviated and re-amplified. Experience in these poems is concentric rather than linear, echoes of circles and spheres, of repetitions and refrains. The subject matter is time—self-referential hours and decades, time at once alternating and static, cyclic and monolithic, alienating and echoing, time circular and frozen as stone.

66 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 2, 2016

About the author

Carol Frith, co-editor of the poetry journal, Ekphrasis, received a “Special Mention” in the 2003 Pushcart Prize Anthology and has had work in Seattle Review, POEM, Measure, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Rattle, RHINO, & others, with chapbooks from Palanquin Press, Gribble Press, and Finishing Line, among others. She has a full-length collection from David Robert Books and a second collection due out from FutureCycle Press in March 2016.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


A SUMMER DREAM

The foxing parchment of a memory:
we’re smoothing linens on the unmade bed.
I dream a summer moon, three sails, the sea.

Whose summer is it? This part is lost to me—
or vague. Perhaps the moon’s a sun. I spread
the foxing parchment of this memory—

pale vellum—on the bed. It’s utterly
invisible to you. Some shadow’s fed
this dream of mine: a moon, three sails, the sea.

You fold a quilt with patient sympathy.
Perhaps the dream is something that I’ve read:
the foxing parchment of a memory

that isn’t even mine. Two or three—
what are they—sails? I hear what you have said:
I dreamed the summer moon, the sails, the sea.

We stack the dirty linen. Nothing’s free.
You ask me if my moonlight-ships have fled.
I close my eyes to save this memory,
my summer dream: red moon, three sails, one sea.


INDETERMINATE BREEZE, STONE FOUNTAIN

I have separated myself from the letters
of the alphabet, from the stone fountain
in the neighbor’s yard.

I have forgotten what it is I need to know,
what mysteries I need to listen for.

I will parse the sentence of the afternoon,
each word drifting like a frail leaf
on an indeterminate breeze.

Were my French good enough,
I would translate my unrest into
perfectly modulated French phrases.

My French is no longer good at all.

I shall put aside my small book and think
of how long I have lived my life in youth.
In age.

I shall wear a warm scarf and contemplate
the passage of the quiet years.

I shall put on a modest dress and walk
the neighborhood, counting pairs of courting
flickers in the tulip trees.

I shall focus on the clean beauty of time
in its increase and time in its diminishment.

I shall face the east to say my daily prayers.
I shall walk until the evening turns to stone.