Elizabeth Arnold’s style is understated yet unmistakable. Her diction is plain yet precise, her lexicon rich but never fussy. Her syntax tends to stretch out, with a single sentence often enjambed across multiple lines of variable length organized into alternating two- and one-line stanzas. Her sentences are typically declarative, but exclamations—so hard to pull off in a poem!—often amplify, interrupt, or complicate her declarations. The poetry stays close to speech and can seem committed especially to the awkwardness and angularity of thinking out loud, but through a strange alchemy of these elements it achieves an idiosyncratic music. Witness the poem “Whistling Acacia,” which begins by raising a question about speech and ends with the promise of song:
With no leaves to speak of
during the drought,
the tree is just a sparse spattering of needles
and hardened balls that once were fruit
ants now poke holes in
—it’s a moon plant!
rattling in the wind you’d think
from the way it looks,
chilled air heaved across the nearly treeless plain of the Mara
encountering resistance only
in this shrunk low brittle whistler, thorn,
all it would be without the song.[1]
In the poem’s first line, we might hear the phrase “to speak of” as a familiar colloquialism merely indicating the degree of the acacia’s leaflessness. But the economy of Liz’s verse and especially the sharp line break after “of” amplify the idiom’s emphasis on speech itself as an index of attention, of what bears noticing. Of what do we speak, and under what conditions? It’s a question that animated George Oppen, too, and like him, Liz persisted in speaking carefully, often as if perched on the precipice of vast silence. Here the plant may seem meager, but the poem asks us to notice it anyway. We might also notice how the poem’s speech scatters via alliteration into “a sparse spattering,” a human capacity giving way to the bare physical form of the whistling acacia.
Indeed, there’s not a hint of human presence in this wind-scoured, moon-like landscape, other than the voice of the poet. And that’s exactly what the exclamation “—it’s a moon plant!” emphasizes. Exclamation marks typically serve to emphasize a certain phrase or its meaning, but another of their effects in a poem—possibly an even stronger one—is to call attention to the presence of the poet herself as the source of emphasis, the person bearing witness to whatever inspires the exclamation. And here that witnessing also shifts the tone of the poem, at least for a moment, into something like silliness, which is a type of human warmth—the very thing that’s otherwise absent from the poem’s scene. Thus the exclamation instantiates a voice and gestures toward conversation even while reminding us that there’s no one here.
Silliness is one register that wonder might take; once the exclamation fades away, a kind of quiet astonishment remains. It’s a pervasive mood in Liz’s poetry, often communicated simply in sustained descriptions of the natural world or in the accretion of scientific and historical facts. One astonishment is that the desiccated fruit of the seemingly barren plant is actually teeming with life: several species of ants make their homes in the fruit of whistling acacias, and in exchange for shelter they protect the plant from herbivores (such as giraffes or elephants) by swarming the animals’ nostrils when they attempt to eat. Another astonishment is the discrepancy between the sight of the acacia and the way it sounds: rather than rattle like a dried gourd, the ant-riddled fruit whistles in the wind. The fifth stanza subtly enacts this process of discernment and surprise, first presenting the plant as “rattling” before the words “you’d think / from the way it looks” call that perception into question. The phrase “you’d think” is another of those quick idiomatic gestures that help the poem sound like casual speech while also bearing more significance on the page than they might in conversation. The link between seeing and understanding is conventionally strong (consider, for instance, the sentence “I see what you mean.”), but here it’s hearing that leads to understanding. What you’d think at first sight, the poem suggests, might be overturned by sustained listening.
But instead of describing the acacia’s whistle, the next line shifts our attention to its source—“chilled air heaved across the nearly treeless plain of the Mara”—which blows across the page in fifteen syllables and seven or eight beats. This extension creates at once rhythmic momentum and geographic sweep while the line’s rich assonance shaped by [s] sounds stitches a sort of whistling into the poem’s verbal texture. And then, brilliantly, resistance returns as enjambment. When the wind finds “this shrunk low brittle whistler,” the poem’s lines break and coil again into something a little pricklier: “thorn, // all it would be without the song.” Such sudden flashes of unelaborated yet resonant significance are a particular reward of reading Liz’s poetry, and this one transforms “Whistling Acacia” into a sort of ars poetica. The thorn is literal, of course, but it’s also a word loaded with pathos or perhaps passion in the old sense of that word: suffering, affliction, the long mortal trial. In some tellings, trials lead to transcendence or transfiguration, but that’s not what this poem tells us. Here the hope is that affliction itself might sing. That a modest, hard-won form—of a plant, say, or a poem—might through adaptation and tenacity provide something like consolation. A moon plant!
To locate life in inhospitable situations and wonder at its persistence is a gift that Liz gave us again and again. Cancer wards, nursing homes, and military hospitals are among the sites her poems visit. In her work, body and soul are always vulnerable and often under threat. The world itself can seem ruined or on the verge of ruin. At the heart of her final book, Wave House, is an astonishing version of “The Wanderer,” the tenth-century poem of solitary exile in a barren realm.[2] But the work neither hardens into weariness nor retreats into fear. Liz never balked at the thorn, and she never stopped listening for the song. Another of my favorites, “Desert,” from Skeleton Coast, tells of being stranded in a landscape as demanding as the Mara. The poet’s car breaks down in the heat “[j]ust across the border from north Texas,” and she pulls off the interstate onto a forgotten road that dead-ends among abandoned buildings.[3] Once again, there’s not another person in sight, but this poem’s drama—and its comedy—unfold on a more personal scale. She sizes up her situation across fifteen taut stanzas, the heat in the car rising around her and her dog, until in the sixteenth she finally opens the window,
just a crack because I
feared some slasher-movie kind of incident,
cruelty that seemed
fitting here,
the sun being cruel
and the sharp sand grains.[4]
Here the threat is not only the inhumanity of sun and sand, but also the space this vastness allows for human violence; the poem registers both a real fear and a jokey sense of that fear’s ridiculousness. Finally the heat becomes so unbearable that she fully opens the door and emerges “[a]s if a living thing could leave its tomb.”[5] Then something miraculous happens:
I ended up on the car hood
where these birds I didn’t recognize
fed on locusts
it looked like. There was the
click of exoskeletons,
a remarkable display of leaping
—by the birds! (it wasn’t flying)—as they
went by turns into the cloud, came out
invariably with a bug in the beak,
then shot back in,
my dog tugging at the leash
but we were
free, me barely catching breath in
wonderment
at another kind of what.[6]
Stranded, waiting for rescue, the poet has no choice but to step out into the open—to come back to life. One short declarative statement establishes both her presence and her bewilderment: she’s looking, but she’s not sure what she’s looking at. And with one long final sentence stretched across twelve lines, declaration twists into song, its syntax growing slightly strange. A little cloud of predators and prey becomes a highwayside spectacle, an ecstatic moment within the real, the sheer thrill of persistence. The poem moves from near panic to almost breathless “wonderment”—from one sort of vulnerability to another—with disarming frankness. Liz was a fearless poet, open always to the scariness and strangeness of life on Earth, with its endless “kinds of what,” but also always open with us. It’s hard to think of a poet with less use for irony. Each of her poems is its own “remarkable display” of attention and sincerity, of a mind at work, of a soul making its way. In her books, Liz has left us an indelible record of human presence, a deep resource for which I am deeply grateful.
Notes:
[1] Elizabeth Arnold, Wave House (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2023), 97.
[2] Arnold, Wave House, 55–68.
[3] Elizabeth Arnold, Skeleton Coast (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2017), 86.
[4] Arnold, Skeleton Coast, 87.
[5] Arnold, Skeleton Coast, 88.
[6] Arnold, Skeleton Coast, 88–89.