Incantations: poems

Darnell Arnoult has written some of the South's most memorable poems of the past quarter-century, and Incantations is her most evocative and mysterious book. This collection shimmers and sparks with an electricity I hear in "that thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and gold and whatever that conjures up" that Bob Dylan envisioned. Arnoult offers strange and beautiful images steeped in sonic and metaphorical richness: "Sun rhythms over a howling serpent telling / you rain is long gone and her children, / light as Venus and drunk as owls, / flood judgment." These glorious poems manage to be both sharp-edged and lush, a parabolic book of paradoxes, and as "Morning" reminds us, "Glory talks in a hard language." Listen. Let the widening spell of Incantations transport you through dark portals and back into the welcome and needed light.-Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

The poems that make up this mesmerizing collection are born from the deepest kinds of grief-grief that comes from worlds burning, from death that dances and glides, from widowhood with its "slaughtered and emptied heart." Our lives are transient; everything changes form, moving from one existence into another before disappearing into the past. As Darnell Arnoult tells us inIncantations, "the human gaze licks itself / with the fascination of sorrow." Yet she also rejoices in the curative properties of language, how it can bewitch and rescue us from despair. There is salvation in here, and therein lies the magic in this gorgeous and mysterious collection. These poems truly are incantations-charms for remembrance, for protection and rebirth, and always for love, no matter how it may shift its shape.-Denton Loving, author of Tamp

These poems boom and sing. They are tooth and balm and gut. They howl into vine-covered chasms and plumb the depths of human sorrow while traversing a landscape of shadow and ghost. There is an impossible frailty to the world Darnell Arnoult conjures and an impossible strength. Here are prayers wrought of gravel and old pine, choked weeds and rising water-but also of marsh birds and shimmering grasses. A thunderous collection. Blazing and true.-Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread