Receipt for Lost Words,
the 2022 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize winner, is a mother’s attempt to understand a world in which her child does not, cannot speak. It’s an accounting that Catherine Arnold renders in breathtakingly moving, spaced-apart phrases, little gasps of insight into a parent’s heartbreak, bafflement, and isolation. Catherine began to write these poems in response to her daughter’s mysterious loss of speech. She felt compelled to explore what had happened, to try to find a way to make it bearable. One poem became two, then three—before long, she’d produced a complete manuscript. The collection went through many revisions, developing in surprising, sometimes painful ways. The poems are about loss, grief, joy, and love. They are about the myths and realities of maternal love; they’re an examination of language, its force and its limits.
Catherine Arnold has accomplished nothing less than the embodiment, in words, of wordlessness. A moving receipt for what has been lost. —Rebecca Kaiser Gibon
“Nature now is what I see through glass.”
And, if we hold our breath through desperate parental denial and efforts to “word the silence,” we
release it when Stella—the one who cannot speak—makes her presence known.
“the strong unhurried length of me/ I am Stella.”
The spare, sensual language of Stella’s point of view stuns—as in this description of her father.
“a big thirsty shape/ the hum of him”
What emerges is a new sense of the world, a magic and fairy-tale shift, in which
“…everything/which seemed to matter before/has been forgotten.”