Carol Frost "has long been one of the most interesting poets writing," wrote Jeffrey Shotts in Rain Taxi online. Frost's collection Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems contains works whose subject matter is influenced by religious sources such as the book of Genesis and by classic works of literature such as Shakespeare's The Tempest. Pure and I Will Say Beauty find the poet's attention drawn to nature and its intersection with the human world. "When Frost ties ... abstract themes with real-life details," wrote Doris Lynch in a review of Love and Scorn for Library Journal, "the poems become more vivid and moving." The Queen's Desertion, Frost's tenth collection of verse, was called "stark, complex, and beautiful" by E.M. Kaufman in Library Journal.

Love and Scorn probes the complexity of various human conditions, such as the poems "Fate," "Obsession," and "Hypocrisy," which utilize story-like narratives. Love and Scorn reveals an "admirable energy" featuring "chthonic desires [and] mythic parallels," according to a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Shotts noted that the collection showcases the poet "at her most stylistically developed."

In Pure, "fate and the natural world intersect," asserted a Publishers Weekly contributor. The critic noting that Frost avoids romanticization in her work; for example, the volume's title poem concerns a hunter who mistakes his son for a deer and shoots him. The collection is notable for its "strident, questioning voice," its "hefty lines" and its "clean language," according to another Publishers Weekly contributor, the writer attributing similar qualities to the poems in Frost's Venus & Don Juan. The poet's writing "is dense," wrote the reviewer, "requiring—and rewarding—the reader's deep attention." Summarizing Frost's poetry, Shotts wrote that her "brilliance is in her ability to capture moments that strain toward soaring song or deep despair, but that nevertheless linger at the thresholds of the breaking point."

Frost's focus in I Will Say Beauty is nature. First viewed with appreciation, the natural world is then given a new focus, as the poet adopts a darker, more somber view of the relationship between humans and the natural world. "Seldom has a poetry book been so well orchestrated," wrote Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal. Ann Killough, reviewing the collection for the Women's Review of Books, noted that, in I Will Say Beauty Frost appears "to be attempting a real, full-throttle encounter with the natural world itself, rather than using it primarily as a vehicle for metaphor, as in many traditions." As Antioch Review contributor Jane Satterfield commented, "Frost's is a metaphysical lyric, carefully deliberative, emotion artfully measured through syntax."

Frost once told Contemporary Authors: "After starting college I tried to find what would satisfy and provoke me. To that end I studied French literature and art at the Sorbonne, trained with the Pan American flat-water kayak team, learned photography well enough to place some of my photographs in art shows in New York, married and had two children, and traveled for three years, learning German and some Greek, in Austria, Italy, East and West Germany, England, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lebanon, Greece, the Bahamas, France, Mexico, and from Texas to Maine.

"Satisfied as I have been in my travels, no territory or endeavor seems more provocative than sitting in a room with the scrappy beginnings of a poem; not knowing, if the fragments will ever be wholly a poem; not knowing, yet still willing to empty myself of a pleasing, conscious order or emotion, a set morality or voice. Then, in the chamber that is the unfixed imagination or at sea with the imagination, off charts, to discover what will suffice, what will shine in the eye and resolve for the ear. Not to be comforted by the usual or the unusual until it is right, right for the poem, and then to savor it and take it.

"The essential part of a poem isn't in its subject or mode but in its reverberations, the inward arabesque of emotion and notation; and my particular concern has been not to write poems about this or that locality, in jargon or embroidered by simpleness, but to try to give the reader a sense of human truth and natural wonder based on little particulars, actual or imagined, which accumulate, treating each emotional instance as a palpable mystery which can with very great care be described, and each time finding in words the illumination which both clarifies reality and gnaws at its edges."

Related poems

Related authors