Booktalk: Crossing Stones

I've just finished reading Crossing Stones, a novel in verse by Helen Frost. Set in the time of America's entry into WWI, it wrestles with the still present issue of how we react to dissent in a time of national crisis. It pits waves of patriotic enlistment against the blossoming movement for women's suffrage. This turmoil erupts within a pair of rural families, each with a son and daughter of age. How parents, students, friends, and the country-at-large deal with the convulsive change brought about by that war strikes parallels to the present that make this novel a powerful tool for discussions.

The poetry itself is sometimes striking, but its strength is its "closeness to the bone;" revealing very realistic situations and reactions with great integrity. Frost has employed a visual form to her poems to mirror the freethinking protagonist (open verse, jagged stanzas ; like a creek) and "cupped-hand sonnets (shaped like the linking creek stones) for characters who join the twin families.The visual metaphor is soon lost, but it does provide help keep the characters straight.

In her notes, Frost explains the hugely Herculean rigor of the sonnets' rhyme schemes (first-word rhymes for first-last sentences onward toward the center for one character, last-word rhymes for first-last sentences for the other!) That sort of self-imposed exercise did nothing at all for readability, cohesion, or richness of language. It is the sort of intellectual gamesmanship that doesn't serve would-be young poets well and that gives the art-form an elitist smack..