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One can’t help reading Craig Arnold’s second book of poetry, Made Flesh, without thinking that this is his last book of poetry. On April 26th of this year, Arnold disappeared while hiking to a volcano on a remote Japanese island, and despite government and professional searches was never found and is now presumed deceased. Made Flesh is comprised solely of poems about past and present relationships and it is a terrible irony that this award winning poet (his first book , Shells, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize), whom former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky described as “one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation,” would have his life end alone far from loved ones. The relationships in Made Flesh are portrayed through a remarkable mix of contemporary rhetoric and mythic imagery which express, in Pinsky’s words, “a tremendous emotional underworld, distinctive and memorable.”

This “emotional underworld” is overtly symbolized by the Persephone-Hades myth that dominates the book both in theme and tone. In the longest poem of the book, “Couple from Hell,” Arnold in a rhetorical style that is ironic and conversational, “retells” the story of the goddess of spring’s abduction by Hades the god of the underworld. Utilizing a narrative technique that compares with the best of Robert Frost, Arnold guides the reader through a series of psychological portraits of the mythic couple’s “strained” relationship. Portraits expressed in a style so facile and intimate that the ancient myth morphs into a recognizably accurate explication of a contemporary relationship:
You are Hades
brooding over your lightless kingdom
with a cigarette between your lips like a little fuse...
You never dreamed she would take the arm you offered
spilling a whole field of flowers out of her lap

But your house is never warm never enough room
She sits all day beside the window holding her breath
to keep the pane from misting nothing appears to touch her
any comfort you offer she resists

Arnold’s lack of punctuation (evident throughout the book) is never a problem with his masterful use of the caesura and line breaks which lend his poem the kind of dark elegiac sentiment found in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Nowhere is this more evident than the long narrative poem that begins the book. In Incubus, Arnold uses the old world myth of a demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women–not for any typical modern horror story, but as a psychological metaphor for the emotional complications in a relationship that is more sexual than intimate.

A long, narrative poem–which is the pervasive style of the book–“Incubus” begins with a line that at first blush seems rather unobtrusive, “The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs/on the peg over hers, and he’s inside.” Arnold’s forte is his ability to build tension, partly from the ominous title, in the sequence of mundane actions: her making tea and nervous one-way conversation sitting on the couch--until he finally speaks, “it’s almost a relief to hear him ask it: If you’re not using your body right now/maybe you’d let me borrow it for a while?” Out of context, it reads like a line from a sci-fi horror movie, but Arnold never lets the reader forget the psychological implications of intimacy. Later, in a surreal reminder of the title as a metaphor, the speaker describes the sexual act from the woman’s point of view, “How it happens she doesn’t really remember,/drifting off with a vague sense of being/drawn out through a single point of her skin/(a bedsheet threaded through a needle’s eye)/and bundled into a body that must be his.”

Despite the moments of disconnection and unrequited desire in many of Arnold’s poems, more often than not there’s light in their emotional underworld. The best example occurs in the books’ title poem, “Made Flesh,” an overtly romantic love lament in which Arnold makes use of a traditional metaphor of passion as fire and consummation:
And when we lie
together and I feel your bones
blaze and the rose of your face unfolds
and the incandescence of your skin
crackles like the paper at the tip
of a drawn-on cigarette and dies
in a final fluttering of ash

Traditionally, the sexual conceit would end here, but Arnold develops the motif further into a spiritual metaphor, wherein the height of intimacy, what the French call jouissance, the little death, becomes a rebirth.

Then then we feel death
as the deepest coming then we ease unhurried
into the bud of the body then we learn
little by little to relinquish
gracefully and less afraid
each time to let each other slip
slowly out of our clasp made
fire made flower made flesh

It seems fitting that these last two words serve as the title of this last poem of Craig Arnold’s last book of poetry. Taken from the Gospel according to John, Made Flesh embodies the missing “Word” of the famous phrase on every page. For Arnold to have titled his book verbatim would have been redundant and misleading. It is out of the flesh, the agony and ecstasy of intimate relationships, that Craig Arnold, who “dwelt among us”, has made words “full of grace and truth.”

Yale educated and versatile, Craig Arnold is an award-winning poet whose first book, Shells, won the 1998 Yale Younger Poets Award. He was also a professor at the University of Wyoming.

If you go:
For more information about the Friday, October 2nd High Plains Book Award banquet at the MSU-Billings Ballroom contact the Billings Parmly Library at 657-8292. Writers and publishers interested in participating in the BookFest should mail a note or call Corby Skinner-406-294-2390; YMCA Writer’s Voice; 402 N. 32nd St. Billings, Montana 59101 or go to:
http://highplainsbookawards.org

Reviewer Burt Bradley is an Associate Professor of English at Northwest College in Powell, WY

YMCA Writer's Voice
   402 North 32nd 59101
   248-1685 ext 231
   www.billingsymca.org

    The Writer's Voice is a literary program of the Billings YMCA.

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