Love and need

7.5/10. An interesting book that is a mixture of biography and an analysis of Frost’s poems. A bit awkward in places — the book needed closer editing, some sentences are unnecessarily long and convoluted. Central to the book is an exploration of the puzzling relationship between Frost and his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson. After Frost’s death, Thompson wrote a series of volumes that seemed deeply critical of, if not outright hostile to Frost. Central to Thompson’s project was the question of Frost’s relationship to Kay Morrison, a subject that feels almost prurient — more a matter of gossip than a subject requiring extensive biographical scrutiny. There’s a lot of speculation that can never be confirmed (always a problem in a biography), and psychological analysis from someone who is not a psychologist and did not meet or talk to the subject of the diagnosis, which makes that aspect of the book problematic. However, there are some genuine insights into circumstances surrounding many of the poems that are interesting. There is a lot of talk of God in the book, but Americans do talk about God more than Canadians do.