Barbara Bialick's Review of Carol Frith's, Looking for Montrose Street

Barbara Bialick's Review of Carol Frith's, Looking for Montrose Street (Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Kentucky http://finishinglinepress.com)

Carol Frith’s chapbook, Looking for Montrose Street, is a good and powerful little work, that expresses how memories of those we love who are gone stay with us. “The mind will go back to the stream it’s used to.”

Using both poetry forms and vivid imagery, she reveals how memory is both a constant part of and disconnected from the present. Parents, aunts, and relatives like David “pursue” her. Indeed, even the 1950s are awake and alive in her mind.

I got déjà vu reading“Waxed Linoleum”: “The plaster is delaminating on the wall,/ blue flicker of a fifties’ television set/…shining blue as the Honeymooners at 8 P.M.” as her father “rigid” (like someone dead) sits in his “Naugahyde recliner…”‘The poems highlight both the power and fragility of memory, in such phrases as a “Ferris wheel of air…” or “I feel my skin remember you in fragments”. The theme of this book could be: “the mind will go back to the stream it’s used to drowning in…”

Carol Frith, of Sacramento, California, is co-editor with poet Laverne Frith, her husband, of Ekphrasis, “which publishes poems addressing individual works of art.”This chapbook is part of the New Women’s Voices Series of Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Kentucky. She may be “new”, but she is also an ancient and wise voice I recommend you read.

* Barbara Bialick/Author of Time Leaves,from Ibbetson Street Press