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.

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.