That Carol Frost is not better known and better celebrated is one of the mysteries of contemporary American poetry. For nearly three decades, and with increased clarity and sureness since 1994’s Pure, she has been amassing a body of work that is distinctive, meticulous, and searching; she deserves a place beside the best poets of her generation. A reason for Frost’s relative obscurity may lie in her resistance to fashion: in the steadiness and seriousness (which is not to say humorlessness) of her tone; in her willingness, for all her disciplined ambivalence, to arrive at conclusions with something resembling commitment, to speak with an authority oddly suspect in current practice; and in her devotion to the natural world and to the rhythms of rural life. But in Frost’s poems, "nature" is possessed of a strange mystery: her clear-sightedly literal and disenchanted descriptions are set ringing by their proximity to allegory and myth. This has led some readers to accuse the poems of a too-easy "romanticism," but such an accusation ignores the fierce ruthlessness of the work, its refusal to deny a cruelty necessary to the life it describes. "The body has a season and hungers," Frost writes, and her poetry is distinguished by its unwillingness to disguise appetite, or to lament the damage it inflicts.
          Readers familiar with Frost’s work will be unsurprised to find the affirmation of her title significantly complicated, though never disallowed, by the poems that follow it. In "Gull," the first poem of the book proper (there are two proems), the notation of mere loveliness meets with correction:

Every wing, every instant burgeoning with wind,
has an attendant grace. The sky sweats, copper
haze blears the horizon for tomorrow’s storm
the gulls annunciate. Ah (you say), also consider
the flesh of the turtle burnt black by strange
decay–turnips gone bad crowding the air–
and the hoarse whispers of the sea,
Icarus consumed in the burning sea.

There are two versions of nature presented in these lines, but neither cancels the other; the poem’s unattributed second voice enters with "also consider," and the darker beauty it offers is an enlargement, not a negation, of the poem’s opening loveliness. Nor is the mythology of the first lines ("attendant grace") abandoned; but its return insists upon a fuller vision, a recognition of the sea’s sinister voracity. The inevitability of that appetite, of consumption, is encoded hauntingly in the final lines quoted here; nothing in the poem has suggested Icarus, but a place for him is already made in the tolling cadence of intensified repetition: "and the hoarse whispers of the sea, / Icarus consumed in the burning sea."
          The suggestion of opposition in Frost’s title is intensified when the line appears in the body of a poem: "I will say beauty." But who is being opposed? On one hand, I think, Frost positions herself against a school of aesthetic theory that would question the status of beauty, or challenge its existence or at least its relevance; such a position, which has seemed an assumption at least of literary theory for the past two or three decades, has increasingly proved vulnerable to attack, perhaps most eloquently in Denis Donoghue’s recent Speaking of Beauty. But the poems also position themselves against those who have made unnuanced claims for the positive nature and effects of beauty, who have denied (Elaine Scarry comes to mind) the terror that so often in these poems accompanies it. The poem in which the book’s title appears is called "The Part of the Bee’s Body Embedded in the Flesh," an image that emblematizes Frost’s difficult knowledge of her subject. The poem presents "The bee-boy," who "on sultry thundery days / filled his bosom between his coarse shirt and his skin / with bees"; it ends:

Whatever it means, why not say it hurts–
the mind’s raw, gold coiling whirled against
air currents, want, and beauty? I will say beauty.

Beauty acquires fullness, in these poems, only when tempered by something overwhelming, terrible, threatening. "Only if the dark conceives it," Frost writes in "Wild Rose," "must I think of beauty."
          But such an insight–that beauty threatens its perceiver–has its own history: it suffuses all the torments, variously lived and feigned, of Petrarch and his heirs; and it is ratified, in the twentieth century, by Rilke, Yeats, Stevens, to name only the giants. It threatens to become itself a cliché, an insight assumed before it is felt. There are two reasons for this hardly ever seeming the case in Frost. First, hers is a poetic sensibility obsessed with the joining of contraries (it is, to this extent, metaphysical, and Frost has listed Donne among her earliest loves); to do so seems an essential motion of her thought. The resulting figures aren’t quite paradoxes, but they yoke together experiences that elicit very different responses. In "Nature has," another voice of correction excoriates the speaker for her squeamishness in the face of nature’s sexual exuberance: "do you blush toward / the meeting in the bower, a lark fluent in the leaves, / soft fires underneath and the trilling / ruthless?" The fluency of the lark takes on substance in "the trilling ruthless," a shocking joining of the supposed lovely and the vicious. Elsewhere, the sun’s movement across a landscape is a "magical and savage passage," "decay mingle[s] with light," "the gulls lift suddenly, simply, / and call out horror and sweetness, facts of our fate."
          More importantly, Frost’s vision of beauty escapes cliché by the authority of the specific, her immensely and meticulously detailed descriptions. The landscapes that fill her poems–in this book largely the Florida Keys–are lived in, known so deeply that they seem to have been internalized in the truest sense: the poet expresses herself in their terms. This is the bridge, for Frost’s poems, between the literal and the figurative, and it courts failure. In "Eel Spearing," the shift to abstraction feels inexact and unearned:

The boat rocks,
the water almost opaque but for sun through alders
glancing off the crumpled surface in one breath
of wind, then sinking a foot or more, and it is
promise, tone, direction, regret, and love.

The syntax of the passage forces us to read the "it" of the final clause as "the boat," which seems an insufficient repository for such allegorical weight. That Frost recognizes this is suggested by the next line, which begins "This is the power of their bodies" and is, thanks to its uncharacteristic vagueness, no better a support. A more representative poem is "Paradise," where affect is expressed in the terms of landscape with a conviction garnered from the poem’s previous detail ("sand-muck, sea mammals, / lemon, salt, and grass"):

My lungs lift
as if I’d swallowed a small seabird and it took
the currents offered it and still flew. Improbable,
but something did stir, the way wind stirs
in a strange orchard, flicking a flower
we cannot stare quiet or less strangely gorgeous.

The first image is fanciful, and again the poem allows for correction–significantly, a correction expressed also through landscape. The contemplation of nature, for Frost, becomes the contemplation of the self: "the dark comes over the water / and looking outward in that dark / is the same as looking inward."
          If Frost’s explorations of nature’s "dark" are convincing for their specificity, they also gain authority from their unwillingness to excerpt the speaker from the violence that surrounds her. These poems are willing to offend our sensibilities, to view necessity stripped of sentiment. After a brief setting of scene, "How to Hunt"–which joins Frost’s earlier, thrilling poems about hunting, "To Kill a Deer," and "Crows"–speaks with a chilling nonchalance:

The deer vanish into the forest,
patches of red oaks,
a bumper crop of beechnuts and acorns.
You try to be as clean as possible.
Your hunting clothes are laundered
in no-scent detergent. You also shower
and shampoo with no-odor soap.
You stay downwind or use a cover scent.

The speaker’s familiarity and intimacy with the natural world ("The big eight-pointer / you’ve been watching all October / walks on and on outside your range") does nothing to mitigate a ruthlessness that is merely an acknowledgment of necessity and natural processes: "That’s how to feel. Whatever comes / into the clearing must find its own way to outlast you." What saves the speaker from callousness is the recognition of her own embeddedness in such processes, her disenchanted facing of a mortality lurking everywhere in these poems. In "Given," she acknowledges the inevitability of that mortality, and its triumph over both the organic and the ideal that jointly form her vision. It is a sign of the complexity of that vision, and of the achievement of this exciting and deeply beautiful book, that the poem can dramatize a passage through utter disenchantment to a kind of affirmation, however austere:

And body, brine on skin, all living fluids,
evaporate, fall back into island soil.
Faith and love into atoms without form and limb.
And the sun into darkness and into sun.