What Travels with Us: Poems

by Darnell Arnoult

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...

• 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

Slightly Uneven Poetry but Wonderful Storytelling

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

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.