The
first line in Kenneth Frost’s debut chapbook, Night Flight, sets a somber mood: “An empty room,” whose size is
aggrandized by the minute “crucified fly” in the next line, provides a
capacious tableau for the poems that follow, most of which are fingernail-thin
filaments of text. The ample white space which the poems’ persistent minimalism
creates is filled with a fluid dreamscape of symbolic, primal images. Among
much musical language throughout the book, perhaps the most prevalent and
heavily weighted sound is the long “O” introduced in the first poem with
“yellow ropes.” These “yellow ropes” are bridles the “night jockey” is said to
be using on stars, inferring that the ropes are in themselves empty. The plaintive
sound that gives voice to such onomatopoetic words as “moan,” “alone,” and
“groan” echoes throughout the almost empty pages of the book like “Lost
Flutes,” the title of a poem which plays with haunting variants of the hollow
sound:
The wind spins
weathervanes around
shrieks
at soloing
hunters’ bones
Deer hold
their breath
cherry-red
in the naked
wood
The
long vowel sound of the diphthong in “about” readies the reader/listener for
the stark sister sounds of predator (“soloing/hunters’ bones”) and prey (“Deer
hold/their breath”), which are then released in the solid thump of the short
vowel sound in “wood.” Indeed, the nightmarish landscape pervading the
transparent sleeper’s empty room evokes the O-shaped mouth in Edvard Munch’s painting
“The Scream.” Nowhere in the book is a sleeper or dreamer described, which
makes the reader experience these dream-poems directly. It is the reader, then,
who is reminded of nightmares in which s/he tries to scream but can’t: a dream
so universal, it could be said to be basic to the human psyche. The “shrieks”
are not grammatically connected to the hunters nor to the deer, and neither is
it clear whether the deer are dead or alive when holding their “red” breath in
the wood. This elliptical grammar draws the reader even deeper into the
experience of the poem-dream in order to elucidate the elusive meaning.
Part
of the elusiveness is the physical nature of the hunter. Throughout the book,
the predatory O morphs from a crOw to a coyOte to a human’s rifle scOpe, and
back again, collectively creating an eerie fear-of-the-unknown so dominant in
dreams. This varying expression harks back to the book’s cover art, which
features an abstract painting by Jonathan K. Rice. The monochromatic painting
consists of several wide brushstrokes that could be seen as an anthropomorphic
or avian or animal figure, depending on the viewer’s frame of reference and
perspective. The work required by the readers/viewers to understand the cover
art is their visual entrée into the
“night flight” on which they are about to embark.
The
poem, “Bird,” does with words what the cover art does with brushstrokes,
invoking the image of the crow to do so. The poem opens with an abstract image
of shadowy avian movement:
The bird flaps
out of
his shadow
and with a slight
shudder
the shadow streaks
off.
The
closing image overlays the poem with a semantic weight, portraying the obscure,
shadowy movement as a “language of darkness,/writing black/into the air.” This
crow-language native to the land of dream resonates throughout the book: in
“Haystack Dreams,” “Crows sat on his mop [a boy’s haystack head of hair],/wrung
him dry/in their split-tongue/language,” and in “Around the Lullaby,”
Light leaves the late
afternoon.
The field asks
nothing from its crow’s-foot
language of snow.
The
field onto which this quiet, enigmatic language is inscribed does not ask for
its meaning. Rather, it accepts the existence of the language in all its
elusiveness. Though the “night flight” takes us through the heavily symbolic
world of dream, it does not impose any sort of analysis upon its possible
meanings. This dreamscape is not fodder for a psychoanalyst. It simply is.
The
threatening presence—linguistic and physical—of crows morphs into other
manifestations of menace throughout the book. “The Chase” is the first of
several poems that feature coyotes as the central predators. I will quote this
poem in full, emphasizing the O sound to illustrate the way in which it creates
a semantic framework for the poem:
CoyOtes flOat out of the trees
decked in rat cOats for their full-moon
travelsong.
The flOtilla bOws and twists
and giggles hunger to the deer sucked
by the quicksand of newfallen snOw—
these light-fingered pianOthrOats
trading boogie from bOth ends
of the keybOard, thOse harbor lights
trailing the guts of the full moon.
The cOcaine wake of the deer’s blood
grails pain to its hypnotic garden
where brain circuits are read
by a dust storm on Mars.
The
opening image establishes coyotes as wraith-like figures which will continues
to haunt the reader: we will encounter them again and again in other poems, for
example in “Coring the Moon,” “Coyotes run in circles,/mad for nothing of the
moon./They try on their ghosts/in the moon’s dressing room,” and later in
“Thoreau”:
Coyotes pad
on the pine needles
and bend midnight
to a breeze
while their slight smile buries
hunger
like old pharaohs
in their eyeteeth.
The
coyotes’ dressing room activities, however paranormal, and the hint of human
feeling manifested in their “slight smile” morph them into partially
anthropomorphic figures. This happens elsewhere in the book, too, such as in
“Half Dog,” which begins “half coyote,/half man,” and later in “Night Patrol,”
where the ostensibly human speaker is seen trying to “rise and sleepwalk
in/animal ancestors with brazen eyes,/soft-colored and padded as armored
vests.”
The
human nature of the predatory energy which floats through the book is
manifested more fully in the poem, “Terrorist”:
Living a life inside this sun,
crosslines that push the inner walls
of zero so it won’t cave in,
I get caught in the shepherd’s crook
of my own triggerfinger as
it pulls me back to life and death.
The
hollow terror of the terrorist’s rifle scope is here felt to be somehow
essential to being human, and this is an insight only dreams can reveal, an
innate knowledge held in our subconscious by our dark shadow selves. Our waking
consciousness cannot come to terms with the fact that the triggerfinger is one
with the shepherd’s crook, that death is frightening and comforting at the same
time. Once again, this symbolism isn’t something to be analyzed: the poem does
not attempt to reconcile the two faces of death it portrays: it simply asserts
that it is.
Woven
throughout the book’s frightening images, predatory figures, and baleful sounds
is a moon-calm that comes to predominate the end of the collection. The
second-to-last poem, for example, is the eerie “Red Moon,” which, notably, is
not full: (the O emphasis, again, is mine)
A crOw
pulls
his black
clOak
Over
his
shOulders
and sinks
deeper
into
the red
quarter
moon.
The
poem is as slender as the lit sliver of moon, which absorbs the crow into its
dark shadow. The uneasy red of the moon is a reiteration of the “red, purple
and gold/diseased splendors” in the poem, “Deserted Autumn,” which at last
returns us to the empty room where we began our “night flight.” It is here
where the throaty sounds of animals fill our sleep, giving voice to our primal
natures:
Voices rattle the tin
cups of the leaves,
memories
begging for blood.
A phalanx
of blanched draculas
surges forward
to the dead drum
in a dog’s throat.
The
concurrence of plosive sounds in this last stanza of the poem provides a hard
ending, just as “wood” thumps an end to the hollow O sounds that carry the
reader mournfully through the poem “Lost Flutes.” However, unlike “Lost
Flutes,” plosive sounds create the framework of the whole poem, starting with
predominantly crackling “k” sounds: “in a cracked window,/how could he hear/the
leaves crumble,” and then morphing into the deadening “d” sounds which
predominate the final stanza.
The
sleepy-hollow sounds, the crackling night-fire sounds, and the musical gliding
sounds that bridge the two all collectively create the sense of an
animal-avian-anthropomorphic language that resists being understood on a
conscious level, but is innately, intimately understood on a subconscious
level. In the slim volume of Night Flight,
Kenneth Frost has composed his own little book of night music that both haunts
us and lulls us as we settle into our own bodies’ cradles of life and death.
The first line in Kenneth Frost’s debut chapbook, Night Flight, sets a somber mood: “An empty room,” whose size is
aggrandized by the minute “crucified fly” in the next line, provides a
capacious tableau for the poems that follow, most of which are fingernail-thin
filaments of text. The ample white space which the poems’ persistent minimalism
creates is filled with a fluid dreamscape of symbolic, primal images. Among
much musical language throughout the book, perhaps the most prevalent and
heavily weighted sound is the long “O” introduced in the first poem with
“yellow ropes.” These “yellow ropes” are bridles the “night jockey” is said to
be using on stars, inferring that the ropes are in themselves empty. The plaintive
sound that gives voice to such onomatopoetic words as “moan,” “alone,” and
“groan” echoes throughout the almost empty pages of the book like “Lost
Flutes,” the title of a poem which plays with haunting variants of the hollow
sound:
The wind spins
weathervanes around
shrieks
at soloing
hunters’ bones
Deer hold
their breath
cherry-red
in the naked
wood
The long vowel sound of the diphthong in “about” readies the reader/listener for
the stark sister sounds of predator (“soloing/hunters’ bones”) and prey (“Deer
hold/their breath”), which are then released in the solid thump of the short
vowel sound in “wood.” Indeed, the nightmarish landscape pervading the
transparent sleeper’s empty room evokes the O-shaped mouth in Edvard Munch’s painting
“The Scream.” Nowhere in the book is a sleeper or dreamer described, which
makes the reader experience these dream-poems directly. It is the reader, then,
who is reminded of nightmares in which s/he tries to scream but can’t: a dream
so universal, it could be said to be basic to the human psyche. The “shrieks”
are not grammatically connected to the hunters nor to the deer, and neither is
it clear whether the deer are dead or alive when holding their “red” breath in
the wood. This elliptical grammar draws the reader even deeper into the
experience of the poem-dream in order to elucidate the elusive meaning.
Part
of the elusiveness is the physical nature of the hunter. Throughout the book,
the predatory O morphs from a crOw to a coyOte to a human’s rifle scOpe, and
back again, collectively creating an eerie fear-of-the-unknown so dominant in
dreams. This varying expression harks back to the book’s cover art, which
features an abstract painting by Jonathan K. Rice. The monochromatic painting
consists of several wide brushstrokes that could be seen as an anthropomorphic
or avian or animal figure, depending on the viewer’s frame of reference and
perspective. The work required by the readers/viewers to understand the cover
art is their visual entrée into the
“night flight” on which they are about to embark.
The
poem, “Bird,” does with words what the cover art does with brushstrokes,
invoking the image of the crow to do so. The poem opens with an abstract image
of shadowy avian movement:
The bird flaps
out of
his shadow
and with a slight
shudder
the shadow streaks
off.
The
closing image overlays the poem with a semantic weight, portraying the obscure,
shadowy movement as a “language of darkness,/writing black/into the air.” This
crow-language native to the land of dream resonates throughout the book: in
“Haystack Dreams,” “Crows sat on his mop [a boy’s haystack head of hair],/wrung
him dry/in their split-tongue/language,” and in “Around the Lullaby,”
Light leaves the late
afternoon.
The field asks
nothing from its crow’s-foot
language of snow.
The
field onto which this quiet, enigmatic language is inscribed does not ask for
its meaning. Rather, it accepts the existence of the language in all its
elusiveness. Though the “night flight” takes us through the heavily symbolic
world of dream, it does not impose any sort of analysis upon its possible
meanings. This dreamscape is not fodder for a psychoanalyst. It simply is.
The
threatening presence—linguistic and physical—of crows morphs into other
manifestations of menace throughout the book. “The Chase” is the first of
several poems that feature coyotes as the central predators. I will quote this
poem in full, emphasizing the O sound to illustrate the way in which it creates
a semantic framework for the poem:
CoyOtes flOat out of the trees
decked in rat cOats for their full-moon
travelsong.
The flOtilla bOws and twists
and giggles hunger to the deer sucked
by the quicksand of newfallen snOw—
these light-fingered pianOthrOats
trading boogie from bOth ends
of the keybOard, thOse harbor lights
trailing the guts of the full moon.
The cOcaine wake of the deer’s blood
grails pain to its hypnotic garden
where brain circuits are read
by a dust storm on Mars.
The
opening image establishes coyotes as wraith-like figures which will continues
to haunt the reader: we will encounter them again and again in other poems, for
example in “Coring the Moon,” “Coyotes run in circles,/mad for nothing of the
moon./They try on their ghosts/in the moon’s dressing room,” and later in
“Thoreau”:
Coyotes pad
on the pine needles
and bend midnight
to a breeze
while their slight smile buries
hunger
like old pharaohs
in their eyeteeth.
The
coyotes’ dressing room activities, however paranormal, and the hint of human
feeling manifested in their “slight smile” morph them into partially
anthropomorphic figures. This happens elsewhere in the book, too, such as in
“Half Dog,” which begins “half coyote,/half man,” and later in “Night Patrol,”
where the ostensibly human speaker is seen trying to “rise and sleepwalk
in/animal ancestors with brazen eyes,/soft-colored and padded as armored
vests.”
The
human nature of the predatory energy which floats through the book is
manifested more fully in the poem, “Terrorist”:
Living a life inside this sun,
crosslines that push the inner walls
of zero so it won’t cave in,
I get caught in the shepherd’s crook
of my own triggerfinger as
it pulls me back to life and death.
The
hollow terror of the terrorist’s rifle scope is here felt to be somehow
essential to being human, and this is an insight only dreams can reveal, an
innate knowledge held in our subconscious by our dark shadow selves. Our waking
consciousness cannot come to terms with the fact that the triggerfinger is one
with the shepherd’s crook, that death is frightening and comforting at the same
time. Once again, this symbolism isn’t something to be analyzed: the poem does
not attempt to reconcile the two faces of death it portrays: it simply asserts
that it is.
Woven
throughout the book’s frightening images, predatory figures, and baleful sounds
is a moon-calm that comes to predominate the end of the collection. The
second-to-last poem, for example, is the eerie “Red Moon,” which, notably, is
not full: (the O emphasis, again, is mine)
A crOw
pulls
his black
clOak
Over
his
shOulders
and sinks
deeper
into
the red
quarter
moon.
The
poem is as slender as the lit sliver of moon, which absorbs the crow into its
dark shadow. The uneasy red of the moon is a reiteration of the “red, purple
and gold/diseased splendors” in the poem, “Deserted Autumn,” which at last
returns us to the empty room where we began our “night flight.” It is here
where the throaty sounds of animals fill our sleep, giving voice to our primal
natures:
Voices rattle the tin
cups of the leaves,
memories
begging for blood.
A phalanx
of blanched draculas
surges forward
to the dead drum
in a dog’s throat.
The
concurrence of plosive sounds in this last stanza of the poem provides a hard
ending, just as “wood” thumps an end to the hollow O sounds that carry the
reader mournfully through the poem “Lost Flutes.” However, unlike “Lost
Flutes,” plosive sounds create the framework of the whole poem, starting with
predominantly crackling “k” sounds: “in a cracked window,/how could he hear/the
leaves crumble,” and then morphing into the deadening “d” sounds which
predominate the final stanza.
The
sleepy-hollow sounds, the crackling night-fire sounds, and the musical gliding
sounds that bridge the two all collectively create the sense of an
animal-avian-anthropomorphic language that resists being understood on a
conscious level, but is innately, intimately understood on a subconscious
level. In the slim volume of Night Flight,
Kenneth Frost has composed his own little book of night music that both haunts
us and lulls us as we settle into our own bodies’ cradles of life and death.
Night Flight
By Kenneth Frost
Main Street Rag
Publishing Company, 2010
ISBN# 978-1-59948-278-1