Name: The Apple Tree
SKU: 9780872333888
Availability: InStock

Description

In The Apple Tree, the title poem in this collection, Catherine Arnold explores the cost of emotional repression, of feeling trapped in a code of silence and invisibility. The poems that follow dive into the experience of a woman gradually discovering her creative voice, becoming an artist and learning to embrace the world of color and touch.

In vivid, lyrical language, Arnold explores what it means to leave behind a set of inherited rules that distrust the physical world and shut down the power of wonder and spontaneity. She considers the price of freedom, what it means to feel like an exile, and the nature of maternal love; many of the poems are addressed to her daughter.

This is Arnold’s second collection. Her debut, Receipt for Lost Words, won the 2022 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.

Catherine Arnold grew up in Cheshire, in the northwest of England. Having fallen in love with painting, she moved to the United States to study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating from the MFA program, she exhibited and taught widely, receiving awards from The Royal Academy of Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Flintridge Foundation, and The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. While making her living as an artist, she also wrote, torn between the equally seductive demands of words and color. Over the years, the need to write became increasingly urgent.

Arnold’s poems and prose have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, Natural Bridge, The Ekphrastic Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. Her debut collection, Receipt for Lost Words, was awarded the 2022 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and published by Bauhan Publishing.

Arnold lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.

Praise For The Apple Tree

Catherine Arnold’s poems perform the sensitive work of a linguistic Geiger counter: revealing radioactive elements within domestic interiors, familial repressions, acts of maternal devotion, and art’s impulse. Marked by longing and observation of the human and natural worlds, the narrator of these poems gathers up shafts of light and pulsing energy in the everyday, turning them into word-spells that help us weather the disenchantment (and reenchantment) we often experience in daily life. These poems achieve—in their seasoned maturity—wise equanimity, clear sight, and a sustaining version of the truth.

—Heather Treseler, author of Auguries & Divinations, Parturition, and Hard Bargain

“Catherine Arnold’s hiatuses, her stops and starts, allow space for disparate sensations to connect or to float free, sometimes both at once. Over and over, these powerful and distinctive poems manage to combine a dreamy discontinuity with a fearless focus on experiences and sensations that are often traumatic.”

—Rachel Hadas