The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

Another great novel by Walker, complete with solid characters and clear descriptions of a place. In its exploration of a long time friendship between two couples, it asks when are we most ourselves and do we change or mearly become more of who we are and can we ever expect others to understand us. If you've ever wondered why you can't quite connect with old friends, read this.

I think Sharon Bryan's use of poetic device is simply stunning. If only her poems could take on physical form, take flights of fancy as they do on the page. If only her poems could become her, because unfortuneately(sic) people, she stinks in person. One does not come into contact with many people in one's life that one would consider absolutely odious. I am shamed to say that in this case, I would rather have full frontal lobotomy than sit through another class with Sharon Bryan. I feel, as do my colleagues, that we are all now dumber because of our exposure to this tactless, heartless, objectifying frankenstein of so-called modern letters. I rue the day I saw her.

Sharon Bryan has a superb feel for words and a distinct original way of looking at things. All of the poems here are worth reading, and many of them are brilliant.

I usually take particular interest in the title poem of a collection. Sometimes it completely encapsulates the poet's point of view--sometimes it ties together several loose themes within the book. At eighteen lines (narrow lines at that) "Flying Blind" is one of the shortest poems in the book. It is short and tight, with monosyllabic words dominating the poem Each word like an attention getting clap--especially in the first line, "We can't quite see". The harsh vowel sounds give power and directness. Larger words come later in the poem as the ideas become more complex and abstract in lines such as "to serenade the universe". "Flying Blind" explains that we know the world and the universe only through our words, and that as we "fly" through it all we only really have our language to guide us. The voice of the narrator is speaking with the authority of a director of a production, speaking from offstage to explain the principle idea behind the scene. With the exception of "Frankly", "Trimmings" and "What Biology is all About" it is hard to say exactly where the narrator is in this collection of poems. In fact, it is almost like a "Where's Waldo" book--she is usually in the position of one in a crowd, rarely referring to herself as an individual. It feels as though she is one of us (sometimes speaking for us) referring to "we" "us" and "our" as a collective humanity, and when "you" is used, it refers to all of us, as though we are being addressed by this Poet/Teacher conglomerate who is sharing wisdom. An example of this conglomerate voice is in the poem "Foreseeing". The audience is not inclusive of the narrator, although she is present in the form of voice. While there is no "I" in this poem, there is a sort of omniscient "eye", one that is not present in all of the poems, but in a few (such a as in "Beholden", "Bemused", "Minutiae" and "Theory". In these poems there is "you". Her omniscient voice in "Foreseeing" has a strange sense of personal knowledge. The voice is one of experience, one that is intimate with age. The poem made me think of writing on a wall, perhaps carved into marble--speaking a truth to us amongst the statues--perhaps like proverbs deemed absolute and universal. What does "we" and "us" do? As I was reading these poems I found myself buying into the ideas presented, and I was able to relate to the narrator in a strangely personal (strange because she seems so impersonal) way. I found myself thinking "Oh, she's one of us", sparing me from a large condescending tone explaining how the world works(like the Wizard of Oz). I feel as though I am on Sharon's team with all the "we" togetherness, as though she is the woman sitting next to me who happened to speak for us all. I have to wonder what her purpose for distancing herself from her poetry is-- and what purpose that serves for her in the process. I wonder if she feels a distance between herself and her poems, or perhaps a fear of intimacy with her inner self (it could also be she was simply trying to be different). Her focus is largely outward, with a leaning for the appreciation of words themselves--as if the words actively shape her reality rather than words describing her reality. She seems to have fun with it, as seen in the poems paying tribute to prefixes and suffixes (i.e. "Be-" and "-Esque"), coming to a point with the cliché ridden rhythmical poem "Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language". I did not like the poem all that much, on the surface it is unoriginal and against the norms of avoiding clichés in poetry. However, I commend her for taking a risk with this poem. There is a recognized power behind clichés, and this poem is a bunch of snippets of emotion delicately arranged. The fact that the poems are alphabetically arranged further demonstrates her priorities on letters and language. While most poets tediously arrange their collections based on emotion, topic, and general feel, Sharon Bryan has gone even more basic-- the alphabet. The alphabet being the roots of all written and spoken words, without which there would be no emotional conveyance--no transference of thoughts and ideas through speech, writing, or poetry. Sharon Bryan's distance from her work makes a point--that point being the importance of language. Is it a coincidence that that is also the point of the title poem? I don't think so. I highly reccomend this collection.