Civilization

by Elizabeth Arnold

Poetry. CIVILIZATION is Elizabeth Arnold's second volume of poetry. In deft yet emphatic syntax, these poems move from politics and history to an intimate gesture, from ancient fragments and architectural facades to a father's face. The layers she excavates in the process are both archaeological and psychological; at the limits of civilization we find both silence and archaic force, "the white-noise granulated light, a sand-storm whiteout." As Eleanor Wilner writes, "These spare and unsparing lines, taut with a formidable restraint, vibrate to frequencies that her almost preternaturally acute perception allows us to share."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

Elizabeth Arnold has received numerous awards including the Amy Lowell scholarship, a Whiting award, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Her poems regularly appear in major poetry publications such as Poetry magazine and The Kenyon Review. In addition to Life, Arnold has published three books of poems, The Reef, Civilization, and Effacement. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

[One of my favorite Flood books: The Quemadura design frees from the gutter the page numbers; the typeface for titles is small, bold and adjacent to the poem, as well as scaled to the typeface; the boards and size a light and handsome thing eleven years later. Eleanor Wilner's blurb, too, captures the essence of Arnoldian vertigo-- a description John Palattella will pick up on in a later review, and which is indeed a characterization of our response to Arnold's Ovidian syntax. I don't recall how much I paid for it, but if it was the listed $12.95, it was a steal.]

In her second book, Elizabeth Arnold thinks about writing in sequence by not writing in sequence. This would be a departure from The Reef, a debut sequence about the staggering progress of her recovery from Hodgkins lymphoma. Civilization, Freud's crucial word denoting that value on the behalf of which our libidinous drives are subjugated, Arnold occasions in her father's facing Alzheimers. What such a condition shares with those conditions bravely faced by the debut's narrator is its opacity, what Civilization's "Credo" describes as "The thought that there's an overarching order, the belief that there is, isn't really different from | the way of seeing that says this or that thing happened for a reason, | when to make what one can out of what has happened | in or outside the mind, to give that reason, | stamps the seal more deeply in the wax." The "thought" here is the sequence; the "reason" is the poem.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genealogy

How is drainage of the blood from tissues
different from

the water seeping out of swamps above the tree line
into streams then rivers?

As much force in us as in an atom's bindings split.

How different from ideas out of a culture
into actions, us?

....
I love the landscape of this book, and am intrigued by the drive to pull everything together: illness, aging parents, family, loss, art, history, etc. Sometimes it seems to fail to really pull it together, but what a marvel, the trying.

[Michael Gossett · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes a certain kind of confidence to commit to the short poem, a kind that often doesn't work for me (Armantrout, Ryan) but when it does, works the hell out of me (Oppen, Niedecker). Liz Arnold fortunately belongs to the latter group, where the chaff has blown away and what remains is dense grain. I know 'Effacement' is the book that Liz has been getting a lot of attention for lately, but this book is as good, if not better. I can only hope the avid readers of 'Effacement' take it upon themselves to work back through Liz's earlier work and spend a good amount of time with this book.