Shells (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Hardcover]

Mr. Craig Arnold (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: March 11, 1999

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Craig Arnold's Shells, which was acclaimed as "a gifted collection of daring writing" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. "Friendships based on food", Arnold writes, "are rarely stable" -- this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As subjects, cast-offs, or figurative devices, Arnold marshals mussels, crabs, scallops, clams and barnacles. In "Little Shrimp" he imitates the involutions of spira mirabilis, and narrates a night in a Spanish "bullfight bar," recycling the words "camar?nes," "pick" and "black eyes" as "Camar?n de la Isla," "Pick-/Me-Up" and "black light." Such moments of facile male desire, in all its guises, drive the book: a "Great dark man" ("his hand around the glass/ is dark with fur") wields a noirish knife; a "Merman" requires "all the covers/ kicked off to accommodate me"; an elegy for Joy Division's Ian Curtis praises "the ardor of a Bonaparte, a F?hrerA." A circumspect but not entirely unapproving examination of fleshy violence and bravado, "The Power Grip" contains directions for cunnilingus; "For a Cook" adds semen to an eggy alfredo sauce, then hair, and blood, and oil from the skin. The "weird housekeeping" of a "Hermit Crab" suggests Arnold's own watchful metric economiesAhis varied stanza forms create a rigid external structure, while the subjects wriggle beneath. But their hard control often yields to blurry, colloquial human voice: "You say You made that up. You say That's sick./ You say The things men think of are so cruel." Readers will find Arnold's pearly conceits hard to resist, but for all their inspired technique, they offer little beyond the masculine clich?s (straight and otherwise) they examine. As W.S. Merwin's first selection for the Yale Younger Poets series, this book is a disappointment.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This extremely accomplished first volume presents difficult poems, both in form and subject matter. They revolve around the hardened, supposedly protective shell; instead of feeling safe, however, the living creature cowers within. "Freud thought/ the brain developed from the skin, not/ to admit sensation but to shut it out." Seamlessly, the focus turns to people. Flavors and recipes remind Arnold of specific friends and lovers. But then, "friendships based on food are rarely stable." "Shore" is a little masterpiece, depicting friends joining friends, hinting at the severity of their lives and friendship but never telling, titillating the reader just enough to think more about his or her own life. Long and rambling, given structure as they are shoved into tight two- or three-line stanzas (reminiscent of a terrified clam or oyster), many poems teeter on the edge of loose rhyme. Shells is not an easy book to read. For those with the time and patience, it is not easily forgotten. Recommended for most poetry collections.ARochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 102 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300079095
• ISBN-13: 978-0300079098
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,720,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Tasteful Book, April 15, 2002

By 

moonshine 05 (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shells (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

"Shells" was definietly a worthwhile read. The major reoccuring metaphor of food represents relationships and occurences in Arnold's life. The author focuses a lot on the surface of stories and their meanoings. Poem titles such as Hermit Crab can attest to this. The poems concerned with protective coverings have more beneath their surfaces. They represent the mental defense that Arnold has built up. This defense with out the shell can be seen in poems like "Locker Room Ettiquette" and "Why I Skip my high school Reunions." Craig Arnold has a genious mind made for metaphor. The images he creates offer more than one can swallow in a single reading of poetry. Though sometimes the stories may be slghtly long winded, they are extremely intriguing. Because Arnold's poetry is so startling, the feeling the book gives the reader is shocking. He blows the reader's minds with his bluntness, honesty, and unexpected comments. Arnold can gracefully weave in and out of his tale with an oily smoothness. If you like poetry and you like food, this is definitely a great book to study contempoary writings with. It's raw honesty holds a beacon to Craig Arnold's life and childhood. One of the strongpoints of the book was its connection with its audience. "Shells" can be understood by all levels of poetry lovers. Often a bit on the adult with its material, "Shells" is definitely something young adults and adults alike can relate too. "Shells" prompts its readers to ask questions about their own protective coverings and what they defend us from. Arnold's word choice throughout the entire book paints pictures of scenes in our minds. But more than that, Arnold's descriptions are so good that they can enliven our other senses to feel exactly what the he wants us to feel. "Shells" is a solid work that offers poetry lovers a great twist in the metaphorical aspects of life and cooking. The Yale series of younger poets illustrated their excellent decision making skills with "Shells" and Craig Arnold, delicious.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Spicy, But Too Narrowly Focused, April 2, 2002

By 

Allie (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shells (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

In his first collection of poems, Craig Arnold concentrates on that ancient trinity of literary subjects: sex, food and death. Shells has poems about food and cooking, in which Arnold lists and describes various foodstuffs: the "pebbled skin" of an avocado, "the liberal squirt of chili sauce," yellow pumpkin flower fritters, "your sister's stale croissants" or a shrimp's "small black eyes" staring out of a dish of paella. Shells also has poems about sex, "The Power Grip" in particular, which are equally and explicitly descriptive. Then there are poems that combine these two subjects. "For a cook" tells the story of a chef who believed "food should be made with love" and once stirred his own "semen as an afterthought" into the pasta dish of some complaining costumers. Saffron" is another poem that considers sex and cooking simultaneously: the yellow color of the spice is "contrary / to what a purple flower's genitals / should look like." The speaker of this poem contemplates saffron in the context of his relationship with the woman who first showed it to him. His description of the harvest, "a small brown hand . . . spreading the petals, / the womb pinched out like an unsightly hair," is therefore tinged with the innuendo of their own sexual relations. While death never becomes a central consideration in this collection, it lurks at the edge of Arnold's poems. "For a Cook" is a kind of elegy for a man who has died as is "The Power Grip." "Scrubbing Mussels," on the other hand, describes the deaths of shellfish that are cooked alive.
My point in listing all these examples is to illustrate the way that Arnold's Shells can be repetitive at times. Unlike many collections of contemporary poetry, Shells is built around a set of very concrete themes. Food and cooking show up in a large number of poems, as do seashells and sea creatures. Of course, `shells' refers to an abstract as well as a concrete subject and Arnold makes a complex and interesting investigation into the nature of human `shells' particularly in the moving narrative "Transparent," the collection's longest poem. Similarly, "Locker room etiquette" is a humorous but nevertheless sincere meditation on the vulnerability of nakedness, which "makes you / shy as a hermit // crab between shells." There can be no doubt that Arnold is a skilled poet who uses received forms like the Sapphic in the above poem to bring meaning as well as meter to his subject. If only he had written "Locker room etiquette" without mentioning the hermit crab that begins the collection, though, it might be a complicating rather than somewhat redundant poem. Unfortunately, in this collection, he seems to tie his poems together by themes that are explicitly stated rather than implied. When reading Shells I kept thinking, "Oh, here's another food poem, another sex/food poem, another appearance of the oyster, the lobster, here's the mussel again." In some ways that was satisfying because connections were made clearer. In other ways it was frustrating and a bit tedious at times. Perhaps the fault lies not with the poems themselves but in how they come together to form a collection.
Sometime it's satisfying to read poems for the subject or activity they depict rather than for some deeper meaning they're attempting to reach. Readers who like cooking, seafood or shells will delight in some of these poems, and might even enjoy the entire collection because of these themes that Arnold harps on. I certainly took pleasure in "Little Shrimp" in particular because it describes the sights, smells and flavors of just the sort of Andalusian bar I've been in before. As a description, "Little Shrimp" is a perfect 10, and it fits Arnold's sea creature theme. But for the reader who has no experience with the subject matter, the flamenco music, the female matador, the paella and Spanish tortilla, I doubt this poem would jump out as particularly stunning. Indeed, it's the concrete, immediate depiction that makes it so, not its wider implications.
In my opinion, there is a lot to be gotten out of Shells and we should look forward to Arnold's next book of poetry expectantly. In this first one, though, the poet has allowed himself to get too caught up in the concrete aspect of his subject, the cooking and the oyster shells, to give us a completely solid collection.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Redefining the Flavors of Life, March 30, 2002

By 

Sehar Tariq (CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shells (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

The stark, bland, white cover of the book is entirely misleading, for Craig Arnold's book; "Shells" is anything but bland. The poetry has its own distinctive flavor and Arnold's control over the language makes the pages almost reek of the pungent smells of seafood. The images that he invokes are so vivid that sometimes you can almost smell the fish, or taste the spices; "What? This is hot? You're sweating."
The book is definitely "hot" and it will make you sweat and even cringe - but like all things hot, it has a certain bite to it, a particular startling flavor that gets better each time you read it. Primarily focusing on food, sex and relationships, the book is about ordinary everyday things that we all experience; yet it is startlingly fresh because of its unique language and metaphors. Seafood and shellfish in particular seem to hold the key to the greater world for Arnold, as these are his primary sources of metaphor. Aptly named "Shells" the book largely uses various kinds of shellfish and snails to describe the shells people build around themselves and in their relationships and that is why Arnold asks of such people in his poem "Hermit Crab," "Isn't he weighed down? Does his house not pinch?"
Despite the generous sprinkling of metaphors throughout the book, the language is very simple. The language is straightforward and candid and reflects the setting of each poem. There are frank referrals to drugs and sex when talking about friends and years in school and college in poems such as "Scheherazade" and "Roommates." Sometimes the language becomes crude and the open and bold description of sexual acts or referrals to genital organs will make you cringe, especially when he tends to combine it with food as he does in his poem, "For a cook." At other times his references to nudity will be genuinely funny as in "Locker room etiquette" due to the matter of fact and know it all tone that he adopts. Poems where he talks of love interests like "Saffron" his tone is more tender, talking of his mother in "Transparent" you can sense the bitterness and resentment. The constant change of tone and attitude in each poem, while maintaining the same thread of candidness in all of them, makes the book different and interesting to read.
"Shells" is a collection of honest poetry where there are no long flowery poems, creating illusions of the beloved or perfect bliss but just the recreation of moments and people in Arnold's life through the eyes of a connoisseur. Sometimes this book becomes a lyrical book of recipes considering Arnold's descriptions but they are truly recipes of life based on Arnold's personal experiences. For some they might be too spicy, a little too candid and bold in flavor but no one can deny that they are novel and interesting and give one plenty of food for thought.