North of Boston
Frost's breakthrough collection, the book that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, written in blank verse dramatic monologues that capture rural New England speech with a subtlety no one had achieved before. "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man" look like simple pastoral poetry and contain everything: property, community, obligation, grief. Beneath Frost's accessible surface runs a cold darkness that his reputation for optimism long obscured.
Blank-verse monologues that read as short stories with the line breaks left in; come expecting lyric Frost and you get long, talky narratives of rural gloom, hired men dying and marriages curdling at one deliberate pace. 'Mending Wall' and 'After Apple-Picking' apart, little here is quotable, and the flatness admirers call art is, in stretches, just flat.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
