I Will Say Beauty [Paperback]

Carol Frost (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2003

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?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the first volume since her new and selected Love and Scorn (2000), Frost offers a series of ethereal musings on beauty, ardor, summer and the natural world. Set mainly in the Cedar Keys of Florida, the poems include descriptions of snakes and spiders, raccoons, blowfish, oysters, sea anemone and sea gulls, among many other animals. A characteristically romantic passage (in "Ardors") lingers on "nightbirds with a little lump/ of insect under their tongues, breath// of clover, grassy, spiced...." Although there are occasional references to predation and violence here, as in "I've seen their [the eagles'] curved beaks/ tear fishes from the ospreys' grasp," the poems generally remake nature into a colorful dreamscape, suffused with longing and weather. Frost's speakers often introduce the natural world in precious, childlike terms: "the tortoise walks on tiptoe in June" or "Some people like fox or coon urine,/ but you really prefer doe pee." While cuteness is a distraction throughout the book, it is particularly perilous when speakers attempt to address nature directly: "Stop that racket, less flapping; and diminuendo,/ please." The book is divided into 11 sections, each with three or four poems. All but the first poem are right-justified-a seemingly arbitrary choice. The title affirmation ends up overwhelming the book's subject, and one is left with a sense of a missed opportunity to dig deeper, either formally or thematically, in so vast and threatened a landscape.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Frost is an avid witness to tropical nature's balletic busyness. Dazzled by the riotous fecundity of Florida's Cedar Keys, she watches with unbounded appreciation and steadfast attention the watery flight of stingrays, the gust-breasting aerodynamics of gulls, the rise of a dolphin, and the elegance of ibises. She also imagines the dark within an unfurled wild rose, watches the blood bubble from an incision cut in canine flesh, and muses on death and life's eat-and-be-eaten imperative. Frost writes, "The old laws, it seems, / still flower." The earth is still fulsome and splendorous, and what is human-made in this rare and precious place is subsumed as "ferns cover barbed wire" and deer eat carefully planted bulbs. Frost is an emissary to this "messy paradise" for those of us who dwell in worlds less lush, where human constructions displace nature's gloriously varied creations, and her determined, even defiant praise of wild beauty assures us that there is far more to life on Earth than what our species engenders. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (May 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810151391
• ISBN-13: 978-0810151390
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,422,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a beauty that isn't merely pretty, March 7, 2005

By 

Reginald Shepherd (Pensacola, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Will Say Beauty (Paperback)

Carol Frost's poems have an exuberant and often extravagant lyricism that's very appealing. Their lavish language and imagery is mirrored in the lush natural landscapes (primarily those of tropical Florida) in which the poems are set, landscapes charged with significances the poems usually leave just out of reach, "a sweet, negligent sentence//that the mind magnifies." Frost loves listing the objects of her enchantment, the objects of the physical world which enchant her: "I consider my own similes-gardens, trees,/an orchard still rooted, light marine/in the blown air, fruit drunken on the swirl." Like the fecund landscapes they portray, these poems are full to bursting. But they aren't simplistically or evasively pretty; they don't whitewash or evade the refuse and detritus of the world: knowing that "The body has a season and hungers," their response is "Whatever it means, why not say it hurts." The beautiful in these poems doesn't exclude pain; indeed, sometimes it's pain's source. Conversely, pain can be a resource, out of which beauty is made. We see this process of making something of pain in a poem like "The Gross Clinic," which juxtaposes the speaker's troubled nephew's psychic scars, her sister the veterinarian's surgeries that both inflict and heal wounds, Michelangelo's investigations of the sometimes tortured forms that human flesh takes, and the scarred and grizzled protagonists of the Trojan War, wearing their battles on their skin, to teach us "this lesson of body." The syntax of these poems is highly elastic and flexible, able to take in all the things with which the poems are brimming; at times the syntax gets a bit tangled and hard to follow, but this is only an occasional problem. Overall, this book shows Carol Frost to be a very fluent and often eloquent poet. As she insists in the last line of one poem, "I _will_ say beauty," and so she does.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plea for the Palm Tree, August 20, 2003

By 

anna dunn (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Will Say Beauty (Paperback)

It is a cliche to assume that the fading of light, the turning of the day is sexy. There is nothing cliche about I Will Say Beauty. Frost exacts a kind of perfect attention to the unguided details of life creating a kind of seductive landscape that is truly like no other. She moves deflty to and from the shadows that appear within ourselves and the world around us. I read somewhere that a hanging man hears beautiful music. When they kick the chair out from under me I can only hope to hear Frost saying Beauty.

5.0 out of 5 stars Plea for the Palm Tree, August 18, 2003

By 

anna dunn (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Will Say Beauty (Paperback)

It is a cliche to assume that the fading of light, the turning of the day is sexy. There is nothing cliche about I Will Say Beauty. Frost exacts a kind of perfect attention to the unguided details of life creating a kind of seductive landscape that is truly like no other. I read somewhere that a hanging man hears beautiful music. When they kick the chair out from under me I can only hope I hear Frost saying Beauty.