NONFICTION - May 12, 1996

ROBERT FROST: VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS Photographs by B. A. King (Bulfinch: $22.50; 65 pp.). Thirty-four duotone photographs by New England photographer King grace 20 poems of legendary curmudgeon Robert Frost and there is no gilding the lily on the part of either artist. “No one should imagine,” writes the photographer, “that I have tried to illustrate Frost’s poems. . . . It is simply my hope that the photographs will serve as acceptable neighbors to the poems.” Flinty is a word used on the book’s jacket and flinty it is. Almost no human interchange is in the language and very few humans are in the snow-covered, apple-blossomed photographs. What we do see of New England’s inhabitants are their bent backs, over shovel, hoe and pitchfork. But lest you think it’s a simple, lonely life, here is the last stanza of Frost’s poem “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”:

For them there was really nothing sad

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.