Beachcomber

Poetry, they say, can be an expression incapable of being put in words. That is certainly not true of Bill Arnold's Beachcomber. It is a book which resonates with feelings, things felt, and sensed, with all the vivid senses of the human soul, including the author's personal history and blended with a genuine sense of Florida. This is a work that exists in the heart of reader, and freely shares emotions we all share in our closest relationships, especially love, and all its manifestations: between the poet and his deepest experiences while growing up in Florida, falling in love amid the lush tropics. It is full of things felt, not known; things dreamed and starkly realized, not reasoned but thrust upon the soul. It is descriptive moments realized, quietly and beautifully, and cast into rich words. just you and the a poetry talker, reliving the past of family members made real, through how the poet engaged the colorful world of Florida and puts the reader there, experiencing through the poet's eyes: the rich panoply of life, the give-and-take of the personal, amid the weighty news of the world, as filtered in a readable and widely accessible exploration. Beachcomber focuses Florida as it is away from the maddening crowd, as seen through the mind over time: as the poet wrote, "When I was a kid in St. Pete, barely a year old, my mother's friend Joe LaRocca took the picture on the cover of this book of me with the million dollar pier in the background and published it on the front page of the St. Pete Times. I was the "beachcomber." Finding poems in your mind is like finding shells on a beach. My father always told me there was nothing to find in our past, as his father's father ran away with a lady of the night and left my great-grandmother Ella with a slew of kids and he was forever the black sheep of the family. All he knew was that renegade had ferried people back-and-forth between St. Pete and Bradenton, back before bridges. So: I set off in search of the renegade skeletons in my own mental closets. My mother was an Irish O'Neill and Portuguese Tarvis, from the north, and had met my father on a beach at spring break way back before the second world war and the rest is history. Then I found out I was a six month premie baby, and my father had to marry my mother. God, the poetic shells I found on my beach!"