poems by

Kenneth Frost

Poetry chapbook, 36 pages, $8 cover price

NO LONGER IN PRINT

ISBN: 978-1-59948-404-4

Release date: 2012

This Limited Edition chapbook is part of Main Street Rag’s Author’s Choice Chapbook Series.

Kenneth Frost
Kenneth Frost grew up in New York City. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, lived in London for a year to meet with the poet/painter David Jones, taught at Columbia University and The New School in New York City before he and his wife, poet Carolyn Gelland, moved to Maine to read and write in a solitude they could only dream about in New York City. His first collection of poems, Night Flight, was also published by Main Street Rag. In his poems, he is stalking words in orbit.

In this posthumously published collection of Kenneth Frost’s poems we board a “Ferry in the Sunset” as we begin another journey through Frost’s insightful poetry. His work is superbly well-crafted, evocative, and sometimes surreal. Yet he extols the ordinary and elevates both beast and man. In his sympathetic vignettes he thoughtfully considers the artistry of people like Louis Armstrong and Gericault, while he understands and relates to the taxi-driver and the girl in a singles’ bar. Frost ends this collection, “Suddenly, / there you are / in the / electric / eternity / of a dream,” leaving us asking the question he poses, “Who shall I / tell them / you are / with your / long hair / embodied / light?”

Kenneth Frost was a brilliant poet who left us with a legacy of poetry that will surely live on. Time On Its Own is a delightful and inspiring book.

Jonathan K. Rice
Publisher/Editor Iodine Poetry Journal,
author of UKULELE and other poems

RED BEASTS

Do the red beasts
graze on the stars
on the rock dome of sky?
I almost hear
their outlines, all
of them, singing
what is beyond
the rock of rocks.
Sitting beside
the fire, my friend and theirs,
their whip and choir,
I cook and eat their steak;
the blood of time
runs from my teeth.
Ten thousand years,
twenty thousand,
what did I count,
stick hunter,
a mess of stars,
scrut, scrut, scrut
that I red-chalked
scrut, scrut, scrut.
If I have died
I know the mind
a living sleep.

BUDDY RICH ON THE DRUMS

Back to the wall
where the heart leans,
taking dictation
from thunderstorms
that crumble static
in a god’s throat,

I thresh my hides
till temple echoes
chase themselves
in nerve-bellies
flushing all
that a snake knows,

whipping his head
so fast his tongue
stutters his own
drumsticks to point
backward and gulp
the lost divine.

GHOST ZOO

Zookeepers know
people will stop to stare
at locked empty cages
as easily as
full ones.

My body is my dream space.
It pulls me
around ghost zoo
reading the stones.

I have no
time for Pentecost.
Blow the brushfire voices
of its Afro out.
Lost time.
Lost time.

The blackmail of
my childhood is my middle age.
Someone must help me
pay for it.

If you would like to read more of Time On Its Own by Ken Frost, order it today.