Cora Fry's Pillow Book

by Rosellen Brown

Overview

Through the persona of Cora Fry, a wife and mother living in a small New Hampshire town, Rosellen Brown explores the ambivalent ties of love, loyalty, marriage, and family in a series of related poems. This volume includes the entire text of Cora Fry (1977), a kind of dramatic monologue, written in spare, simple lines, which describes the young woman's daily life and troubled marriage. A sequel of newer poems, Cora Fry's Pillow Book (1994), confronts the challenges that come with a woman's growth toward middle age, reflecting an older Cora's place in her family, community, and the larger world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524432
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/31/1996
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Rosellen Brown is the author of the novels Before and After, The Autobiography of My Mother, Tender Mercies, Civil Wars, and Half a Heart; the collection of stories Street Games; and the collections of poetry Some Deaths in the Delta, Cora Fry, and Cora Fry's Pillow Book. She lives in Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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 Unfortunately, the poetry of the later Cora has acquired a kind of middle-aged spread; the chiseled lines have been replaced by an expansive language that tells more than it shows.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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly