Peter Howarth writes:

Frost’s feeling for neighbourly rivalry came very early on. The Collected Prose includes for the first time all 11 of the stories he wrote between 1903 and 1905 for The Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry as emergency sources of income when his farm was doing badly. They are, as Mark Richardson drily observes, ‘surely the best poultry-stories written by a modern American poet’, but they are less about the hens than the reputations of their owners. This is not the moralist’s New England of isolated farmsteads eking out a proud, solitary existence against the elements, but a country in which every neighbour is poking his nose over the fence with advice, quick to scorn and quicker still to wonder how he can catch up. There is a lot of buying birds for show, and even more about poultrymen worrying whether they’ve been made a fool of. Agents spy out good-looking strains in small farms like football scouts looking for potential champions, while passing salesmen talk about ‘tendencies’ in contemporary hen-house design, as if this were House and Garden rather than Farm-Poultry.

(LRB 6 November 2008)

Harvard | hardback 375 pp. |ISBN: 9780674024632