promiscuous beauty by Martin Arnold

Martin Arnold‘s Promiscuous Beauty is a celebration of the messiness and contradictions of our everyday lives. But it’s also more than that. Dig a little deeper and you will find that Arnold is giving us “a study in patience, an apprenticeship in awareness.” The language is down to earth and direct, the images building one after another, line after line, stanza after stanza, poems after poem, revealing a world that is, despite what we often see and hear on the news, actually filled with humor and compassion. This is the book of poet whose vision is growing in breadth and depth, which is, after all, what we want from the best of our writers.

–Terry L. Kennedy, author of New River Breakdown

Thank goodness for the beautiful, wild, sane poems of Martin Arnold. These poems are the fruit of knowledge found in deep engagement and conversation with the human and natural landscapes. Despite his modesty and protestations, in his poem, “Promiscuous Beauty,” one of three with that name that punctuate the text, he is indeed: “a cartographer of clouds and confidant of stars, a recorder of the movement of boulders, an acolyte of the wind.” This is a powerful and wonderful selection of poems by a poet ripening to wisdom.

–Stuart Dischell