In this debut collection, Catherine Arnold writes as a mother whose linguistically precocious daughter, between the ages of three and five, gradually ceases to speak. In Stella’s speechless world, the very ground, air and light are unreliable; sudden sounds, touches, eye contact pose threats. She is subject to fits of fury during the day; at night her mother cannot quiet her agitation. Meanwhile, Arnold’s longing to hear her daughter speak again is
“a solid thing it could be scored and eaten” (“Clearing the Air,” p. 74).
All of this Arnold captures in free verse lines of varying lengths shaped by internal spaces. Her distinctive voice is powerfully direct and yet subtly complicated. She plays with language, for example, by assigning words new grammatical functions: walls lose “their sharp and resolution” (p. 12), Stella fears others will “pluck the vivid from me” (p. 49), water “silks” (p. 57) against her chest. She fears the “squeezing sky” (p. 60). Every page offers new perceptions mediated by original turns of phrase.
In the first of the book’s three sections, Arnold describes how she gradually learns the “Terms of Silence” ( pp. 10-14) under which she and her daughter must live. It is as if they are enclosed by glass. Arnold preserves her sense of connection to the outer world by counting birds seen through a window.
a blackbird in the morning a wren in the afternoon
so I advance bird by bird toward
the topple of the day.
(“One for the Birds,” p. 17)
When mother and daughter venture out to get coffee,
eyes swivel to appraise then return quickly
to the straight ahead
A newspaper reader with “an unforgiving head” studiously refuses to acknowledge their presence.
The thoughtless response of “typical ” mothers to “exorbitant good fortune” amazes the poet and tempts her to envy and anger. A neighbor
hat rammed down on pitiless blonde hair
asks her daughter to pick up a newspaper from their driveway. The child easily, quickly does so, and the mother is not astonished by this “monstrous alacrity.” Mother and child are “accustomed / to the daily arrival of miracles”. And Arnold knows that inside their house
the child is still speaking
and the mother is not surprised.
(“The Others,” pp. 26, 28)
Arnold does not pretend to a heroic invulnerability. Sitting in a social worker’s waiting room, she knows “why she isn’t here” (italics mine). Partly it is because to the bureaucrat, all the women are indiscriminately “Mom.” More deeply, it is because the person the poet once was is already disappearing behind
the closed face the dull
eyes the evacuated body
(“The Waiting Room,” p. 15)
In an extraordinary ekphrastic poem, “In Which Doubt Is Introduced” (pp.38-39), the dreaming poet sees in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
a girl stark new a girl
infinitely implausibly familiar…
My girl
Noting that the new-born Venus possesses nothing, not even words, the dreamer asks whether her girl might be permitted to contain
“Herself only herself
the original defiant creature
with her grooved feet joined in a single fin
speechless and complete
do we have to open her
to coil up the words and ram them in?
A rebellious pain-filled question. A doubt within a dream.
In a tour de force of seventeen poems written in Stella’s voice, Arnold challenges herself and us to grasp Stella’s inner life. Symptoms are transformed into experiences. Stella feels surrounded by mouths, teeth, noise. She hears
language slopping over everything
filling every blissful quiet place
(“They Are So Alone,” p. 49)
This slop of language threatens her very integrity of self:
… to pry the hinges of my skin
to open up the clear of me…
(“And the Words Keep Falling, “p. 46)
Others’ language also threatens to drown out her own inner song through which she copes with the undependable physical world. Transitions are frightening—exiting a car, passing through a doorway—and may require her to drop to the ground, even to taste it. On entering a pool, the stairs are
…preposterously still
then dropping reforming…
I must measure the intention of each step
(“Swimming Pool,” p. 56)
We cannot be, at least while we read Stella’s words, like the woman in the coffee shop (p. 22) who looked
… then placed her eyes in the lining of her pocket
Yet this imaginative entry into the inner Stella is not only painful. In a handful of poems the poet tries to capture the joy Stella obviously experiences on certain occasions. Stella’s senses are so exquisitely attuned to the world around her that her descriptions can awaken delighted recognition in us, as in this account of enjoying a park swing.
the flaring piebald insecurity it lasts just a
moment
as I pull my body back
a pepper-shaker of weight at first
and then the settling in
of all the dizzying parts
squeezing my knees together the white chop
of my feet
then up again
(“The Experimental Air,” p. 54)
From the awful sense of alienation from another human being’s reality, these poems offer oases of relief.
In the final section, Arnold takes us on her journey of coping with the present while facing the future. She is tempted to seek magical powers, to look for omens, to make bargains with fate. As she awakes from a dream in which she sees herself as a wizard battling a word-stealing beast, she admits she wields only a harmless broom.
I say—because I am a wizard
and I am expected to say something
and this is the only word I have now
Abracadabra
(“The Wizard,” p. 70)
For half-a-second we register the sardonic self-ridicule, and then beneath it, we hear, and feel, as if from a guillotine, the thud—utter futility.
In the second-to-last poem, “Music, or Evidence of Stella,” p. 91), Arnold watches Stella dancing to the music of Sly and the Family Stone. The poet realizes that Stella’s experience of music goes beyond anything she herself has known.
music has never startled my skin
this is what they mean by ecstasy
Arnold consults family albums where she finds
calm faces reserved
for the enamel on salt and pepper shakers.
Without sentimentality or any retraction of her own truth-telling, Arnold lovingly affirms her daughter.
I cannot find any evidence
of Stella
Although love is mentioned, literally, only once—as a tea cake useless in a crisis (“Where Does the Fury Come From,” p. 34), at deep levels the poet’s love for Stella suffuses these poems. And a second word, unspoken, hovers over the collection, only to appear as the title of the closing poem, “Hope” ( p. 92). Having moved with Arnold through several temptations to magical thinking, we should not expect to find here any retreat. Rather, Arnold affirms something arguably more bedrock than hope, and at least as common.
Without hope they say
you couldn’t go on
but we do in almost every house
we rise in the morning we brush our hair
and inspect the embers
of the face
Receipt for Lost Words is a triumph of craft and spirit.