REVIEW: Phillip Arnold’s The Natural History of a Blade
Dos Madres, 2019
REVIEW BY MARCIA D. ROSS
Two important things about Philip Arnold’s
poems: they are faithfully attentive to etymology, and intently focused on the
natural world while not self- consciously showing off his considerable
knowledge. His plain subjects—earth and leaves, changing light and shadow, the
fall of snow, the death of everything, suggest with exquisite sensitivity our parallel
human experience, our struggle, even as his poems enrich the mind with gladness
and ease. They do these things with so little showiness that one can easily miss
the deep moments as they pass by in modest expression.
By my sights, Mr Arnold is a poet to watch
for—or better, to listen for—as time goes by. His future poems may leave behind
some of their delightful but occasionally distracting linguistic eccentricities,
stuff that sounds really good or obscure, but that can baffle the earnest
reader or cause her to lose her pace or place, or progress. But there will be a
Casino Real payoff. For all of us.
Arnold’s interest in etymology is one of the
quiet pleasures of this collection. We learn immediately that the word blade is
derived from Middle English, German, and Old English and that it can denote (or
suggest) a leaf, a blossom, a blade (knife, spade). It can also bring to mind the
voices of other great poets. When we read a single line like “at night/ we
become the delicate tongues of bees” and have a sweet sense of Walt Whitman who
sits nearby, contemplating “a blade of grass” at the beginning of Leaves of Grass. Or we may be surprised
with one of Thomas Hardy’s fine tetrameters rhythms that feels almost uncanny
and which is not copying Hardy in the least, but instead riffing on rhythms
that conjure his genius. Arnold is on firm, familiar, rich ground in these
poems, and he knows it. I take that as a sign of good courage as he grows as an
artist.
The
title piece of the collection, “The Natural History of a Blade,” is an example
of a poem with an original voice and something important to say. Without ever sounding astonished Arnold
astonishes:
The scored sapwood opens the mouth
Of the forest: brown petals open
In a dream of thirst, a throat as wide
As the mid-winter sky.
In “The Appalachian Character for Death,”
with its revelation of ravishing, frightening brevity:
six
black
strokes
“spell
out nature’s shorthand /across wet branches” in “winter ink” for the sign of
death. Before long, after some thoughtful consideration the poet settles into a
Keatsian/Hemingway/Camus musing with:
It
isn’t how a life will be erased
That
unsettles me, but how hunger grows
While
the dying are now on our time.
Our time
In “Black Mountain Point” where the poem’s speaker
remembers “to isolate the details / of your silence” (just try it), you have a
hint of Arnold’s considerable linguistic powers under the cover of
understatement and ambiguity. Whose
silence, we don’t know; and the mental impossibility of isolating the details
of a silence? There are many examples of
such skill and innuendo. At the end of this poem his speaker says only “Nothing
is sudden.” (Was it Freud who said, “all change is incremental”?)
Of the several remarkable poems in this
collection, there is nothing to criticize except perhaps a tendency. Arnold can
be thrilling, provocative, and insightful in bringing together the reality of a
living nature and the catastrophe of living, for all creatures. At times the
level at which he unearths showy or strange uses of language can distract; it
can sap the flow of meaning from his more predominant and expression of humble
suggestion and modesty.
I believe he has the makings of a great poet.
--Marcia
Ross
11/24/19
