I Will Say Beauty - Softcover

Frost, Carol

4.16

32 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810151391 ISBN 13: 9780810151390

Publisher: TriQuarterly, 2003

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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?

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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.

"The Part of the Bee's Body Embedded in the Flesh"
The bee-boy, merops apiater, on sultry thundery days
filled his bosom between his coarse shirt and his skin
with bees-his every meal wild honey.
He had no apprehension of their stings or didn't mind
and gave himself-his palate, the soft tissues of his throat-
what Rubens gave to the sun's illumination
stealing his fingers across a woman's thigh
and Van Gogh's brushwork heightened.
Whatever it means, why not say it hurts-
the mind's raw, gold coiling whirled against
air currents, want, beauty? I will say beauty.

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