Elizabeth Arnold: The Reef

The Reef, Elizabeth Arnold (U of Chicago P, 1999)

Where Civilization wrestles with a father's dementia, The Reef deals with the poet's own bouts with (I take it) Hodgkin's lymphoma. Harrowing reading, tho beautiful as well. I admire the ambition that leads her to release, as a 1st book, a single long sequence of poems. Much of what makes Civilization so compelling – for me – is only in embryo here.

[54/100]

***

I'm down with these; working on #5, "got prose?" these days.

Elizabeth Arnold: Civilization

Civilization, Elizabeth Arnold (Flood Editions, 2006)

[27/100]

The classics are everywhere these days. (In my parents' house, I took down from Dad's shelves CM Bowra's The Greek Experience, consicous again of what a foreign country Greek & Latin culture is to me.) Elizabeth Arnold flirts with the classics – a bit of Archilochos & Apollonius, various archaeological digs & Mediterranean landscapes – & juxtaposes those fragments of a lost world with the crumbling edifice of individual human memory: of a father in a nursing home, sliding down the long, painfully gradual incline into complete amnesia. Civilization itself is really no more than group memory, jealously guarded, fought for & passed down. Memory, individual & collective, what makes us human. Perhaps it's just me – the sadness of these precise, careful poems is almost too much to bear.