Monica McAlpine


Review: “Receipt for Lost Words” by Catherine Arnold

           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.


Monica McAlpine

Monica McAlpine’s Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) was a finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Her poems have also appeared in Ibbetson Street, LEON Literary Review, Husk, The Aurorean, Poetry Quarterly, and Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the author of two books and several essays on medieval literature.