[In the following review, Parson-Nesbitt assesses the strengths of the poetry in Cora Fry's Pillow Book.]

Novelist and poet Rosellen Brown refuses to allow her characters less than their difficult and contradictory humanity. Her new poetry collection [Cora Fry's Pillow Book] is narrated by the astute and unsentimental Cora Fry, a woman approaching middle age in a rural, working-class New England community.

The burden of being female, and how women cope, is news as daily as the mail Cora delivers. She describes a friend's extramarital affair with dry wit, and understands of a woman who cremates herself that she had “Nothing left of the world except a narrow strip of fury / on which, satisfied, / she struck the match.”

Cora and her neighbors accommodate to what feels like a suffocating narrowness—not so much of their daily activities as of the ways they are able to see themselves. From these limitations, Brown creates a rich inner life for Cora, who slowly finds redemption in “the insulin shots, the weddings, wills, / douches and rhododendrons, the pills and potato bugs, the bankruptcies / and valedictorians and drop-outs, the picnics and teapots and wakes.”

Cora's life in the outside world is less convincing. Years pass, her children grow up, but no one mentions movie stars, the Gulf War or President Reagan. Cora's landscape consists of creeks and gardens, with no MacDonald's and no mall. The language lacks regional characteristics, but as poetry it is subtle and profound.

Cora refuses to deceive herself about love or the ever-potent American dream, observing of a friend: “She's won the Publisher's Clearing House jackpot / like the rest of us, which could help with these bills if it were only / true.” This beautifully produced book includes the earlier collection, Cora Fry, to which the Pillow Book is a sequel.