Including the entire text of the popular poem Cora Fry, a powerful poetic exploration of family, loyalty, and love portrays Cora as she confronts the losses that accompany middle age and the outside forces threatening her small town.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This edition contains Cora Fry, first published in 1977, and a new sequel, Cora Fry's Pillow Book. In the original poem, a dramatic monologue narrated by Cora, a young mother and forbearing wife living in rural New Hampshire, Brown's language is as lean and spare as a piece of Shaker furniture. Cora tells the story of her unhappy marriage and the grind of her daily life with a flinty Yankee terseness and stoicism; there is no place in her world for self-pity or self-indulgence. Brown's (Civil Wars) depiction of the emotionally and materially pinched lives of working-class New Englanders is reminiscent of Wharton's Ethan Frome: she portrays the drama of the hard-bitten landscape and its inhabitants with a withering accuracy. Unfortunately, the poetry of the later Cora has acquired a kind of middle-aged spread; the chiseled lines have been replaced by an expansive language that tells more than it shows. The watchful, rebellious, tough Cora has aged into a gentler, more compliant materfamilias still married to the repressed "Fry" and devoted to her grown children and hapless neighbors. Fans of Brown's poem will no doubt be gratified by this newsy update of life in Oxford, New Hampshire, even though it lacks the sharp-edged poetry that made the original memorable.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Full of humor, truth, anger, and tenderness . . . Rosellen Brown has given us a novel stripped down to essences in this remarkable set of poems, the vivid evocations of a country woman’s life.” – May Sarton.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Subtle, Quiet, Powerful,
By Jen "Jen" (San Franciso Bay Area, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Cora Fry's Pillow Book (Paperback)
The narrator of Cora Fry's Pillow Book, Cora Fry, is a housewife who suffers from an unhappy, unfulfilling marriage and who watches her children grow old and move away with a sense of desperate melancholy. The book is set up as a series of poems, but really, to understand them, you need to read the book in the order it's presented because it's a story of this woman's life. Overcast with imagery from New England, minor characters, and flashbacks to her childhood, Cora Fry's Pillow Book made me examine the parts of my life I found the most haunting and empowered me to instill change where I felt dissatisfied. Who wants to live a life like Cora Fry?
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