Carol Frith

Early Echoes Carol Frith

In this collection, the "early echoes" are the isolating sirens of patrol cars and ambulances in the darkness, along with poems of morning glories in urban alleyways, of seedy coffee shops and neglected stone fountains in vacant back yards. These poems explore the present by reworking it in terms of the past. Sonnets and villanelles alternate with free verse as present and past subsume and modify the solitary echoes of experience lived and reworded, abbreviated and re-amplified. Experience in these poems is concentric rather than linear, echoes of circles and spheres, of repetitions and refrains. The subject matter is time-self-referential hours and decades, time at once alternating and static, cyclic and monolithic, alienating and echoing, time circular and frozen as stone.