168
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
BEAUTY MAKES SENSE a review by Hannah Crane Sykes Martin Arnold. Earthquake Owner’s Manual. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 2014. Alan Michael Parker. The Ladder. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2016.
HANNAH CRANE SYKES is a native of western North Carolina who currently lives and teaches in the Piedmont region. She holds degrees in English from Western Carolina University and UNC Greensboro and has become a regular reviewer for NCLR. MARTIN ARNOLD is the assistant poetry editor of storySouth and an assistant professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. His poems have been featured in many publications, including Best New Poets 2012, Verse Daily, Crazyhorse, and Denver Quarterly. Earthquake Owner’s Manual won the 2013-2014 Unicorn Press First Book Contest. ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. He has written four novels and eight poetry collections, and his poems have been featured in The New Yorker and The Yale Review, among other magazines. He has received many awards, including the North Carolina Poetr y Society’s 2017 BrockmanCampbell Award for The Ladder.
In keeping with great poetic tradition, two recent poetry publications invite readers to examine the place of wonder and truth in the everyday world. In Martin Arnold’s Earthquake Owner’s Manual and Alan Michael Parker’s The Ladder, readers will find poetry that emphasizes the absolute beauty of the very ordinary stuff of life. Martin Arnold’s collection presents a fresh voice with often playful expressions of poetry. The sections are thoughtfully crafted to revolve around the earthquake motif with titles that trace the full experience: “Falling Objects,” “Aftershocks,” and “Elastic Rebound Theory.” Some poems critique today’s talking heads, and others pay tribute to days gone by or to the natural world. Encountering a collection titled The Ladder, one may recall other poetic ladders, like those in Frost’s “After Apple Picking” and Yeats’s “The Circus Animals Desertion.” While Parker’s voice is his own, he is standing alongside great figures as he addresses the pure joy and the intense agony of life. It is, however, the hovering between the corporeal and the spiritual that readers might find most compelling in both books, which are full of lines that closely bind the explained and the ethereal, the everyday and the spiritual. In some cases, the voices in these poems draw distinct correlations between what we can see to be important and what we eventually deem important after consideration. Many poems in Arnold’s Earthquake Owner’s Manual marry two opposing forces into poetic harmony; these oppositions are achieved by the speaker’s articulate word choices. For example, “Bullied by Lilies” merges the plush world of “leather couches
aimed at a plasma TV” with the lush natural world of “the music of trumpet vines recorded in each drop of honey, / counting gold as it drips from the showerhead of a wasp’s nest.” The speaker captures the artificial beauty of the material world: an Infinity in the driveway, DVDs perfectly organized on built-in bookcases, and glass walls that filter in sunlight. The speaker then relieves the tension of the man-forced world with images of the natural world: “scarab beetles jeweling the ferns” and the breeze whispering to cherry blossoms. The poem artfully conveys the struggle of a speaker caught in two kinds of beauty, who ultimately knows which one is superior. Similarly, “Enough” in Parker’s The Ladder merges the material world with our innate desire for beauty as the speaker conveys first a fascination with a watch that doesn’t keep time and then an eventual reckoning with Time itself. Like Arnold’s speaker in “Bullied by Lilies,” the speaker in “Enough” comes to terms with the tension of trying to live in this world, especially with artistic sensibilities: “I showed everyone all my ideas, / my thunderous, ticking heart.” One recognizes that same nakedness of Yeats’s artistic voice in Parker’s “A Coat.” Like Yeats in his later work, Parker’s speaker ends anger, tracing the past, and sadness and lies down by a stream, his anxiety succombing to the natural world. Both collections also deal in the delightful as they play with form and voice. In Earthquake Owner’s Manual, Arnold intersperses the collection with a handful of poems called “Cloud Collisions, Cloud Collusions.” In these beautiful interruptions, the speaker presents child-mind meditations that bind