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.

This latest work by award-winning poet Sherod Santos -- who has been referred to in reviews as both Keatsean and Rilke-like -- breaks with the conventions of the genre to create a montage of untitled meditations, narrative prose, memory fragments and songlike passages, as well as verse. Less a collection of thematically related pieces than a prolonged inquiry, "The City of Women" represents, as Santos writes in the first of the work's three parts, "the story of my life/In love,the buried life I know little about,/Perhaps know nothing at all." The raw beauty of Santos's images and the musical grace of his language wash soothingly over the imagination, lending even the darker portions of his work -- and there are many -- an elegance that somehow makes the terrible more bearable. Santos does not shy away from the more unseemly, ugly aspects of interactions between men and women, nor does he portray himself as the protagonist above reproach. Even as one is "in" love, he tells us, it is possible to feel sad, lonely and bereft. Every alliance, he seems to conclude, will spawn its share of betrayals great and small, recriminations, shame. Yet "The City of Women" is not driven by a nihilistic vision. Throughout the poem-sequence, we are treated to divine glimpses of love at its best; even his parents' doomed marriage, Santos says, provided evidence of the power of love to rise above individual failings. While Santos provides few comforting answers for his readers, by the end of this work we understand better what the questions are. He offers this stark examination of his own vulnerabilities and frailties so that we may be courageous enough to face our own.

I've been reading Santos for about 39 years now, and I must say this book contains the second, third, eigth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth best poems I've read in that time. Actually I've become so familiar with Santos that before I opened the book I already knew it would be full of poems. Or should I say brimming with poetry. Perhaps Mr. Santos could help me make that decision as he is apparently America's greatest master of the English language. But I digress. In "The Perishing: Poems", Sherod paints a portrait of the shadows that haunt our souls, the monsters we keep hidden away in a box under our collective beds, and the dirty diapers of our hearts that give us a collective rash on our hearts' little tushes. I must conclude this review by saying that Sherod Santos probably owns a poetry machine that he invented to write brilliant poetry, but that will come in good time my friend. A word is like a mouse that lives under your floorboards, and the house of Santos's head must be teeming with mice, such that he has to lure them out with the pen and paper on which he writes his poems. And liberty, and justice for all. And in conclusion, Sherod Santos must have a poetry machine he invented to write poetry for him.

Eventually, the world will tire of academic poets who write for other academic poets. Yes this book is full of literary grace, but it is void of life. Mr. Santos is a poet, but that doesn't mean that he is qualified to write poetry. This book of poems makes me tired, makes me want to sleep, makes me want to drink. Makes me want to go out and find some real poetry...away from the walled confines of academia. There is so much good poetry out there today. Look elsewhere my friends.

I'm sorry, but I found this book flawed with sentimentality and portentousness and the same old rhythms and syntax, etc. I didn't find it moving at all. The speaker (mr. poet) is too busy trying to awe us, but mostly he just falls flat on his face.

Having lost a brother to suicide several years ago, I was amazed and deeply grateful to find a book that put in words the feelings and experiences that have always been beyond me and my family. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone whose interested in learning about dealing with such a terrible tragedy.