Synopses & Reviews
The thrilling new collection from the Pushcart Prize-winning poet
"I will say beauty," Carol Frost boldly says in one of her new lyrical poems, beauty being for her and all of us elusive-in and out of nature. The phrase is meant as a cri de coeur, and the poems are arranged to offer a fresh way to look at--and exist within--nature. For Frost, beauty is a far cry from the decorous and social.
Frost sets many of these poems in Florida's Cedar Keys, amidst the nesting areas of birds, cottonmouth snakes, wetlands, and tidal rhythms. The reader undertakes a journey through a tropical summer, where strange scents and sounds are signs of the transient beauties the imagination may possess for a moment. Drawing brilliantly from nature and from art, from the rhythms of life and the furies of emotion, Frost rejects standard responses and dares to ask: how do we perceive the world? When is beauty not enough? Can we imagine Paradise? And, when nature ordains that death must come, and we weaken, how do we die?
Review
"Only if the dark conceives it / must I think of beauty,' Carol Frost writes, and indeed it is this credible duality that informs and toughens these subtly rendered poems. In lesser hands this book would be merely gorgeous. In hers, by virtue of the pressures of syntax and form, we trust that her affirmations are complex, hard-won, finally—
beautiful. A wonderful book."
—Stephen Dunn, author of Different Hours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Review
"This is nothing less than a remarkable collection of poems. Throughout her career, Carol Frost has consistently recast our understanding of the lyric impulse in contemporary poetry. Her exquisite and measured vision of both the natural world and human complexity conspires with her fierce commitment to the power of art; and her astonishing formal invention is somehow delicate, discreet, and rapturous all at the same time. Carol Frost's poems are eloquent and elegant, exhibiting the ravishing lyric poise of one of our very finest American poets."
—David St. John
Review
"Carol Frost's poems are the most intense discoveries imaginable. Nature is her province, the little fragile beauties, of course, but also the brassy, gutty, hard to reduce forces of darkness.
I Will Say Beauty is composed of northern snows and Gulf Coast bayous, of hymns to fence wire and seabirdds and odes to deer hunting. She is a poet writing at the top of her powers with the ardor few can sustain, confident that beauty inhabits and is the world."
—Dave Smith
Synopsis
For this Pushcart Prize-winning poet, beauty is a far cry from the decorous and the social.
Synopsis
In her new collection of lyrical poems, Pushcart Prize-winning poet Carol Frost meditates on how elusive beauty can be--both in and out of nature--and captures for the reader a sense of the raw, sometimes cruel, beauty of wildlife and nature.
About the Author
Carol Frost splits her time between Cedar Key, Florida, and upstate New York. She has won three Pushcart Prizes and been awarded two fellowships by the National Endowment of the Arts. Her books include Love and Scorn (2000), Venus and Don Juan (1996), and Pure (1994), all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Winter without Snow
Wet Spring Day
ONE
Gull
"Four Serious Sons, Op. 121"
Water Lyrics
Inlet
TWO
Wild Rose
Ardors
The Part of the Bee's Body Embedded in the Flesh
THREE
Sunrise
The Mysterious Quality of Enchantment
Driftwood
FOUR
Windows
Foxes
Fence Wire
Martin's Summer
FIVE
Nature Has
Whelk
Moon
SIX
Lying in the Pollen and Water
Thundestorm
Star-Gazer Lilies
SEVEN
Paradise
Kayaking after Dusk
Given
EIGHT
Reap
How to Hunt
Mr. Brink
NINE
Conch
Rays
Requin
TEN
Eel Spearing
The Gross Clinic
Apiary IX
ELEVEN
A Woman Like Yourself
Hem of Sunlight
Hydrangeas
One Fine Day