FROZEN ROPE by Dennis Pollock

The poems in Frozen Rope are set in 1804 in Hadam, a fictionalized western Massachusetts town, and capture the life of the village and the voices its people, from incorporating the town, to a village murder, to the loss of a child, among other events and visions.

Excerpt from "Night Talk, Of First Child Born Dead"

Are you awake, Faith?
We must be but two quarters
Into this lengthening night.
How the cold presses us,
Two embers in a pile of dark,
Each keeping the other lit.

The days gnawed,
But the moon, the whole of it, out there,
Calling us down the rungs of the loft
To work.
The fleams of the saw
Tear through the pine in my mind,
But my boots lie idle by the fire.

The lake ice shifts
With its spasms of traveling news.
Awake like the lake am I
And I must tell you,
I spoke to our Harold...