ABOUT THIS BOOK

The poems in PEN Award–winning author Carol Frost’s ninth collection spring from her experiences with her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, forming a deeply moving meditation on memory and its role in the creation and evolution of identity and relationships. Frost maintains complete command of her imaginative leaps between the natural and spiritual worlds in diverse poetic forms. Using the disappearance of bees as her prevailing metaphoric backdrop, the poet deftly explores the varied emotions occasioned by her mother’s slow deterioration. Like its eponym, Honeycomb is stunning in its details, but it wears its craftsmanship lightly, yielding an accessible yet profound work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

CAROL FROST is the author of nine collections of poems. She has received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, PEN and Pushcart awards, the Elliston and the Poets’ Prize, and other honors. She holds the Alfond Chair of English at Rollins College.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
(For the ones
Pearly flying hair,
Abandoned bee boxes piled on each other at meadow end . . .
(Tyrannus tyrannus)
I remember the psychiatrist's exam—Then it was autumn.
Two anthills and a late summer hive
As if by amber or in Lethe's stream
The honeycomb is made from flowers
You suddenly wearied. You had to sit
Amid a menagerie she sleeps as in a lair—
Odor plume mellifluous humming, thick syrup
It was August, it was August
If her falling to quiet
To live withoutmemory is to have each hour
As small lamps drift with river tide
Beauty and dust, beauty and dust—
All things are taken from us
The mind is no tunnel deepening
"Generous I may have been, amnesiac
Light clear in a window, morning
Why are we here who owns this house
The humble sense of being alive
Pretty to think of the mind at its end
She wears geegaws from relatives
She saw that the tortured dream wrestled to the floor
That was the mind's wild swarm trapezing from an oak limb,
When bees sicken a rough
She doesn't see herself in the mirror,
Fools die every day they live
Erring shoe and sour bib
What makes her quiet
I watched her sleep then went to the window.

Afterword
From the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores:

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