What Travels with Us: Poems
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Book Overview
With a storyteller's timing and the emotional range of a singer, Darnell Arnoult in her debut collection offers readers a stirring string of poems about the people of Fieldale, Virginia. A planned community founded in the Virginia foothills by Marshall Fields in the early 1900s to support his textile mill, Fieldale was populated by transplanted Appalachian mountain folk. Arnoult herself grew up there, a third-generation resident and among the first generation to go to college. She took away with her the oral history of her home, and in What Travels With Us she captures in poetic form the townspeople's voices, both remembered and imagined. Personal, poignant, and witty, Arnoult's poems look back as they move forward, demonstrating how we are always creating ourselves anew from the experiences we carry with us.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0807129895
ISBN13:9780807129890
Release Date:November 2005
Publisher:LSU Press
Length:72 Pages
Weight:0.27 lbs.
Dimensions:0.3" x 6.1" x 8.9"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Slightly Uneven Poetry but Wonderful Storytelling
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
While I think that Arnoult's poetic voice is somewhat weaker than her wonderful prose in Sufficient Grace: A Novel the storytelling in these poems is still striking such that it stays with me months after reading it. My favorite is "Learning Strategy at English Field" which describes Arnoult and her ex-mother in law wathching Arnoult's son play baseball with Arnoult returning in her memory to her own time as a "rising senior" watching her future husband play baseball at the same field. Several other poems are similarly evocative including these lines from Angels: "And I'm not ready to be a grandma. What's going to happen to us? I'm just thirty-five you know." From a woman falling in love with her 15 year old daughter's child.
Marvelous stories from yesteryear
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
Darnell has a way of capturing and telling a story with intrigue - giving just enough to set your imagination to work, but not giving away too much of the story so that some of the mystery is left up to you, the reader to interpret and enjoy. I grew up in this town and I knew many of these people - she has nailed them. The busy-bodies, the unspoken lives once lived and then left behind, the dreams and passions given way to everyday life in a mill town. It's all there and these stories are marvelous and refreshing.
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