Can't Myth Be Left Behind?

Abstract

...can't myth be left Carol Frost asks in her most recent collection, The Queen's Desertion. This beautiful and challenging book is filled with the intensely evocative imagery Frost fans have come to expect, but it's her concern with our attempts to make sense of our experience?of our lives and our deaths?that creates the urgency driving these poems. Is it possible to face both our mortality and our unlovely decline head on? If so, must we do that by leaving myth, replete with stories of divine origin and magical experience, behind? Frost makes use of three quite different poetic backdrops to explore her subject: 1) her mother's decline into dementia; 2) the complicated arena of contact between the natural and the civilized world, which calls into question our assumption of civilization's triumph; and 3) the truly natural world filled with creatures captive to the cycle of birth, ascendance, and decline. The first section of the book focuses on that great myth of child hood, the strong and unchanging parent. In poems based on her mother's illness, Frost conveys the pain of her loss in a rending phrase, have no mother, then goes on to describe ...Her differ ence? / a broken hive...a black bear in the bluebells / clawing the stinging air. She writes not only to express her grief, but to inhabit her mother's experience as dementia takes hold: For a little while I knew? there was a door / a split in the wall, and I was two per sons... But Meanings fissured. Words hollowed. / It was like the thing with bees? / I swatted in front of my face / and hated them. Then there were none.