Neighbor Blood

Neighbor Blood, Richard Frost's newest collection of poems, demonstrates a fluid ease within a range of poetic idioms - ballad meter, free verse, the sonnet, and a "dwindling" sestina. Frost, also a jazz musician, writes poems that seem loose, genuine, off-the-cuff - like jazz riffs that just "happen". But in poetry - as in music - Frost has earned his ease with practice. Frost's free verse includes several poems on jazz, which spotlight - and demonstrate - the deceptively casual attitude of syncopated rhythm. "Jazz for Kirby", a long poem at the book's center, for instance, formally echoes the precision - and the necessity - of the jazz drummer and his distinctive diction: "'I mean. A dup, a-dup-a and a-dup-a zit tah./Like when it's a-poppa poppa pie, baby, you carry everything.'" With a matter-of-fact sincerity and endearing self-deprecating humor, Richard Frost surveys childhood mysteries, adolescent angst, family erosions - the lonely comedies of our survival. Tremendously tender, these poems are parables concerned with the moral challenges of everyday life.