Jay Parini Poetry Reading and Frost Talk

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | The Robert Frost Stone House Museum is honored to welcome Jay Parini, a renowned biographer (of Robert Frost among others), poet, novelist, and Middlebury professor. Parini will offer a reading from his book New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015, and will talk about the life and work of Robert Frost. This event is free and open to the public. Seating for this lecture is first come, first serve.

Jay Parini's 1999 biography Robert Frost: A Life has been widely celebrated. Richard Wakefield of The Seattle Times has written that the book "achieves the pinnacle of the biographer's art... This should become the standard biography: sympathetic but scrupulously fair, scholarly but readable." Lance Morrow of Time magazine wrote that "Parini's judicious biography puts Frost's dark side in perspective. He is a balanced, sophisticated reader, and his readings of the poems and of the man are shrewd."

Of his poetry, James Merrill has written that "[Parini's] poems are fully imagined and highly accomplished. He never fails to astonish with his grace and wisdom." Julia Alvarez praised the book, writing that "in [Parini's] poetry, we get the full strength of all we admire in this writer: the springs of his lyricism, his keen eye for detail, his absorbing and compassionate curiosity about people and places, an ability to listen and capture the tone of our times, and moral imagination and spiritual yearning that delivers us into a larger way of seeing and being."