John Carle - review of Karen Arnold's Border Crossings
Perry Publishing
ISBN 1-891043-01-3

I submit that there are, in fact, two Karen Arnolds.

The first is the PhD in English, the northeastern professor who writes as a nature poet and a chronicler of the arcana which inhabit her world in Maine. This first writer is responsible for roughly half of Border Crossings. Hers are observations such as "At Pemaquid our lighthouse begins/ four seconds on, ten seconds off - no other light/along the coast is set this way". Hers is the voice that, in poems like "Riversong" and "Tide Markers", contemplates homelands, ancestors and acupuncture. It is pastoral, and can be both lovely and deadly boring.

Maybe it's because I'm a guy. I don't think so, but the publisher's letter that accompanied the review copy of Border Crossings mentions Arnold's "real bonding with other women". Still, most women I know who write do so with a lot more strength and guts.

And, to be fair, Arnold sometimes does too. Border Crossings isn't a write-off, thanks to the "other" Karen Arnold, the one who can burn away the gauzy New-England-in-autumn vision and get down to cases.

In the gray gallery Ansel Adam's (sic) picture is cold morning
Light wedges black ridges
	between mountains and a white lake with pine-cut shores
					Sound waves miles before striking

A breeze wraps my cheek
My grandfather overtakes me
			lanky in memory
					walks in
						talking of Wyoming

		- from "The Cowboy/Random Sightings"

One thing about which is just distracting, and it happens in the language. In the poem "Fear of Children", Arnold uses the scrim as a metaphor. A lot. Once per stanza, for all seven stanzas, actually. "...shadows on gray scrim". "A scrim of water". "over your abdomen like scrim". The effect becomes comic, which I don't think was the poet's intent. "Screen! Drape! Curtain!" you cry.

Still, I'd recommend Border Crossings simply because, when she's got her best stuff, Arnold is very good. Ten bucks for a book half of which you'll forget? Hey, she's got promise, as long as she doesn't let that PhD get in the way.

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