THE YEARNING LURKS

A veteran author offers an eclectic collection of verse.

In the opening of his volume of poetry, Frode makes a modest admission: His first teachers called his language “prolix.” It’s a common enough habit for writers young and old, and readers will see a fair amount of purple prose in the author’s introduction. But this excess is blessedly absent from his verse, which is compact, forceful, and evocative. The collection gathers poems from a life that is stretching into its eighth decade, so it is by necessity wide-ranging. Nonetheless, Frode says they are all “love” poems, at least broadly, and throughout, the author writes enthusiastically about his emotional attachments to people, nature, art, and poetry itself. Readers catch a bit of the poet’s capacious understanding of love in “Arms,” which opens: “My arms / Have held / Strong men, / Ardent women, / All four / Of my children, / My parents, / Bags of groceries, / Laundry, and / Dusty boxes / Of moving.” Here, readers see affections that attach to objects romantic and mundane, and the juxtaposition of ardent lovers and crinkly grocery bags drives the point home efficiently. Elsewhere in the book, readers see Frode expounding on his passion for the craft of writing. In “Poems Are Like Lovers,” a lengthy prose poem, the author writes: “Poems are like lovers; warm arms to fall back into; a fluent and effortless letting go; a music of laughter at each touch; detours into an intimate cul-de-sac; a halt in the acute and obtuse hands of death.” This is an imposing accumulation of metaphors, but it poignantly demonstrates the ways in which even after all these years, language itself still bowls Frode over.

Probing and potent poems that draw on a long life of writing.