Venus and Don Juan - Softcover

Frost, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810150638 ISBN 13: 9780810150638

Publisher: TriQuarterly, 1996

In her sixth book of poems, Carol Frost gives a bravura performance as metaphorist and deft artist. Her poems are an inquiry into morals and mystery: she explores love, lust, pleasure, loneliness, regret, and envy, while voicing a longing for love that cannot be sustained. Frost is a thoroughly original poet whose artistic project is unique in American poetry, and this is her best work.

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From Publishers Weekly:

The strident, questioning voice, the hefty lines and the clean language that marked Pure, Frost's previous book, also characterize the poems gathered in this collection. Frost focuses on the forces that shape and move the human animal, as reflected in titles like "Obsession," "Craving," "Hypocrisy," "Bliss," "Ecstasy" and "Adultery." Here, there is a sense of personal connection, especially in the latter of this volume's seven sections, that was absent from Frost's earlier work. The collection's opener, "Comparison Of," serves as a frontispiece as the poet, discovering the crumbling gravestone of a woman named Mary Hyatt and choosing to imagine Hyatt's broken heart, determines that "the absent/ lover is everywhere." The line strikes a thematic focus for the work that culminates in the last and title poem. Her Venus and Don Juan, "with their own hearts in turmoil," suffer together the loss of love. Elsewhere, Frost is more resigned to love's loss: "Carry me to hell/ deep into the kingdom of Dis where my love lies," instructs the poet in "Farewell to Two Muses." Frost's work is dense, requiring-and rewarding-the reader's deep attention.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Frost (Pure, LJ 4/1/94) has an uncanny ability to disassociate from and observe emotion. She objectifies her analyses by transforming her observations into shimmering and haunting images. Her poems, with titles such and "Obsession," "Pity," "Denial," "Conscience," and "Bliss," are subtle examinations of psychological states through a kind of metaphoric transcription. Frost's persona is both omniscient and vulnerable; she sees more than she can contain or control. The futility of this knowledge lends these poems an elegant frisson that occasionally slips into solipsism: "Never was life more nervous, sweeter, denser then nutmeat/ and honey then when she was obsessed with who she was." Frost's complex studies of identity and emotion are sometimes reduced to cries bemoaning an indifferent universe, the "nothing for which there is not preparation and no relief," and the vagaries of the human heart, whose self-pity is "easy, coarse, common as the grave." For large collections of contemporary poetry.?Christine Stenstrom, Brooklyn P.L., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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