This New Zealand author and poet metaphorically explores the American way of death; she exhumes those rock crystal realities which modern man, in his estrangement from others and himself, has been in the habit of burying. In a society where the elderly are packed away for neat extinction, a kind of Instant Trash Disposal, and TV provides a cornucopia of deaths — the limited supply of human grief and understanding is easily exhausted. Ms. Frame writes elliptically, with caustic impulses which densely course over the same symbolic circuits. It's disturbing and claustrophobic.