Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences

$19.95

by Carol Frost

Carol Frost’s poems have a classical grace and elegance, but there is molten emotion beneath their fluid surfaces. The poetic sequences in Entwined give a reader three perspectives on human awareness: as a lexicon of abstractions (Time, Beauty, Adultery, Scorn, and so on) and what the poet calls “moral dreaming”; as a voyage from the soul’s dark night into a new experience of light among the bays and shoals of Florida’s fecund gulf coast; and as a meditation on memory and mortality, through an encounter with a mind in decline — a parent succumbing to dementia.

Written over twenty-five years in three series, Carol Frost’s twelfth book of poems is formally elegant but fierce in feeling, boldly exploring lineation, an elastic syntax, and inventive punctuation to reach an extraordinary sensory intensity.

by Carol Frost

Carol Frost’s poems have a classical grace and elegance, but there is molten emotion beneath their fluid surfaces. The poetic sequences in Entwined give a reader three perspectives on human awareness: as a lexicon of abstractions (Time, Beauty, Adultery, Scorn, and so on) and what the poet calls “moral dreaming”; as a voyage from the soul’s dark night into a new experience of light among the bays and shoals of Florida’s fecund gulf coast; and as a meditation on memory and mortality, through an encounter with a mind in decline — a parent succumbing to dementia.

Written over twenty-five years in three series, Carol Frost’s twelfth book of poems is formally elegant but fierce in feeling, boldly exploring lineation, an elastic syntax, and inventive punctuation to reach an extraordinary sensory intensity.

About the Author

Carol Frost was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and as a child spent a year in her mother’s hometown of Vienna, so German was the first language she spoke. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from SUNY Oneonta and Syracuse University. The author of eleven previous books of poetry, most recently The Queen’s Desertion and Honeycomb (both Northwestern University Press, 2006 and 2010), she holds an endowed chair of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Advanced Praise

“The interweaving of lost and confabulated, confused knowledge is a running theme… in Frost’s deft hands it resonates and echoes through various natural processes and phenomena.” — Amy Glynn Greacen, New York Quarterly Reviews

“Two readily discernible emotions accompany the experience of reading for the first time a well-published poet of significant talent. First is embarrassment at not having read the poet long before this late discovery. The second is a sense of gratitude, combined with excitement at the prospect of spending more time, now that she is known to you, reading her ambitious and exquisite poems. The embarrassment passes, but the gratitude and excitement fold over time into lasting appreciation. Such is the experience of discovering Carol Frost through her latest volume of poetry, Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences.” — Philip Belcher, Shenandoah

“Entwined begins with myth, a world embedded in the ancient and the natural, and rolls gently into the more personal and specific. What the speaker has seen and watched over and over with a perceptive eye does not leave as the text builds. Precise vision and craft follow in each poem while Frost’s content moves from the macrocosm of memory and the known to its nearly invisible varieties.” — Natalia Kennedy, Columbia Poetry Review

“The poems in this book are daring and intimate in their language and subject matter, and brimming with truths about the human experience and how we navigate through the world.” — Caitlin Neely, The Rumpus

“With her characteristic passionate impersonality, Carol Frost has written, over the years, this great book. A wonder-worker with words, she creates in each poem the most persuasive immersion in a tangible reality and at the same time she articulates in the most surprising ways some of the ultimate ideas and questions of existence. Her language itself seems palpable, and her thinking about human life, her acknowledgment of what we are all really like, is fearless. ‘No more pretty songs,’ she writes in one poem. No. Instead, beautiful ones that teach and compel and exhilarate the reader’s imagination and spirit. We should carry this book everywhere with us.” — Reginald Gibbons

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-49-3