Neighbor Blood: Poems - Tapa dura

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.

Richard Frost is Professor of English at the State University College, Oneonta, New York.