cover image Effacement

Effacement

Elizabeth Arnold, Flood (B&T, dist.), $14.95 paper (100p) ISBN 978-0-981-95202-4

Ambitious, austere, and very hard to forget, this third book from Arnold (The Reef) consists of one 47-segment sequence, all of whose parts have something to do with damaged, disfigured, or surgically altered heads and bodies. Arnold weaves in memories of her own treatment for cancer, but they are brief, almost impersonal. More often she will observe, with compassion and distance, the wounds and the efforts of other human beings, especially those injured in modern war— the "Iraqi Boy," for example, with "two-third of a laughing mouth// visible, the wheelchair in this case,/ its sparkle stark against// the flannel and plied living limbs within it." Many poems react to Henry Tonks's photographs of amputees and other casualties from World War One, "medical illustrations of" (for example) a man who "can't close his mouth// because he doesn't have a mouth." Influenced by George Oppen, Arnold ends up poised between political protest and existential investigation, between an attack on the things we can do to our bodies and an amazement that we have bodies at all. Her "darkness speeding into darkness" offers very little consolation, but clear-eyed readers will prize its serious work. (July)