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Open Books: Event Archive
November 14, 2006 07:30 PM
ELIZABETH ARNOLD
Elizabeth Arnold joins us to read from her second collection,
Civilization ($12.95), recently published by the impressive small press
Flood Editions, out of Chicago. Spare in language and quiet in tone, Ms.
Arnold's poems are nonetheless gem-hard in observation and reasoning. The
book's title surfaces in terms both vast and intimate, with physics,
history, and emotion providing poetic energy. Opening the volume is
"Polis" -- "It's alive what you thought, what you made / happen in the mind,
o precarious ones, // threading your life into us from the other end of
time." A number of the pieces have family as focus, as in the moving "My
Father's Face," which begins, "a civilization / falling out of its
accustomed // stand amidst the world. // He is a happening in the air around
him / happening less...." These are vigorously grounded poems that also
acknowledge a void beyond.
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