Poet Liz Ahl maps out her territory in three collections.
It wasn’t something I read in history class, but rather from actual “being there” experience. I first read about an ancient practice called “beating the bounds” from a blogger based in London that I follow. It’s a longstanding tradition in which people walk the boundaries of their church parish or community every seven years. The idea is to maintain boundary lines and resist encroachment.
The practice carried over when the English colonized America. The surprise is that some states still require “beating the bounds” as a statutory requirement. It’s officially called “perambulation,” and it still exists on the law books in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s applied to towns, and it’s often not enforced, but it still is something of a regular practice in New Hampshire.
Liz Ahl
A 2017 poetry collection by Liz Ahl is entitled Beating the Bounds. Ahl lives in New England. The wonderful title poem is about perambulation. Not only does it frame the rest of the poems to follow in the volume, it also stuck in my head as I read two other collections by Ahl, a chapbook entitled A Stanza is a Place to Stand (2023) and A Case for Solace (2022). “You must walk the path you think you know again, / to see how, again, you don’t fully know it,” she writes.
“Beating the bounds” may be the overall theme for Ahl’s collections. In fact, it’s what poets do. They take a subject, an idea, an object, a person, a place, or an event and mark it with their words – defining it, shaping it, displaying their understanding of it, helping others see what they’ve understood. I’d bever considered that image for poetry until I read Ahl’s poem. Using words, poets are leading the rest of us around what’s being described, marking the boundaries.
This poem is from that 2017 collection. The poet is talking a walk by moonlight, and you can watch how she marks what she’s writing about.
Full Moon Walk
The full moon spills a river of milk
that I follow through the laden evergreens;
crisp tree-shadows are thrown
across this dead-end road like storm-felled limbs,
but the storm isn’t due until morning.
The crunch and squeak of my boots through snow
and the occasional tick of a branch on a branch
are the only answers
to the cloudy breaths I push out.
The moon’s spotlight paints the side of a barn
and the barn glows like a drive-in movie
while my long shadow trudges across its screen.
Hours from now the town plow
will growl around these curves,
searching for new places to push new snow.
The neighborhood dogs
will make their early morning rounds.
Until then, they snore on their flannel beds.
Until then, the old snow,
no house light, no street light,
only this jagged illumination,
this midnight, this whitewash,
this call-you-out moon.
Beating the Bounds is divided into three parts, with the first part looking back to what the landscape was like before the area was colonized. The next two parts are more concerned with contemporary life in this place – bird houses, splitting firewood, a house that wasn’t purchased, and even swallowing and matting away blackflies (I know what that’s like; I’ve swallowed enough of them on bike rides).
A Stanza is a Place to Stand is a short chapbook of 13 poems. I like the word play of the title. The poet visits a maritime museum, builds a snow fort (comparing them to poems), describes an ossuary or bone room, experiences “knuckle-cracking record-breaking cold / whose fists pound hourly the wall,” and discovers this in Concord, Massachusetts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Highchair
The Old Manse, Concord, MA
Upstairs, the docent led us into the room
where the great man wrote “Nature,”
and we stood sweating between the four walls,
sniffing for whatever remnants of genius or insight
might lurk like ancient plaster dust
behind the carefully researched reproduction wallpaper.
I scowled through the windowpanes, trying
to inhabit his vision, to see if the way the glass
reconfigured the sunlight said something transcendent.
The tour’s final room is the kitchen—and we’re shown
the wood fired oven, the set kettle nestled in its socket,
the bathtub. And the wooden highchair,
from when the great man was just a baby visiting
his grandparents, before he had his big ideas,
before he could even climb the stairs to that room
with its yellow pattern of leaves on the wallpaper,
its grand writing desk, its windows full of light.
In 17 lines, Ahl maps the Emerson house, and she focuses our attention on the highchair that he sat in as a baby, symbolizing all of what was to come from his mind and pen.
A Case for Solace is comprised of 47 poems. The poems cover an array of subjects and themes, but I can’t help it. I’m still participating in the march around the borders, beating the bounds. Ahl writes of a friend’s death, suffering, her father’s tools, sitting with a friend whose wife has died, eating oatmeal and being jet-lagged, wearing her father’s hat, and more. She also takes her pruning shears to the dead parts of the lilac bush, and in the process provides a metaphor for life.
Tricking the Lilac
You must prune away
the dead clusters, the browned
petals that perfumed the air
in moist gusts for a while.
You must persuade the branches
that they don’t need to work
so hard on making seeds to spread
from those dead bouquets.
You must offer the lilac a future
of new leaves and blossoms to plan for.
Channel the energies of grieving,
as you must keep the bereaved busy
with the pantomime of living
until it becomes the living.
Ahly has published several poetry collections and chapbooks. Her poems have been published in such journals as Limp Wrist, Quartet Literary Journal, Able Muse, Rogue Agent, and West Trestle Review. Her poems have also been included in numerous anthologies. Formerly a teacher of writing at Plymouth State University, she lives in New Hampshire.
Reading these three collections evokes a sense of understanding and even thankfulness. Ahl provides a different way of understanding poetry, and you’re thankful for the opportunity to read poems like “Beating the Bounds.”
Photo by duncan_idaho_2007, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “Bypass” - February 13, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and the Extraordinary Ordinary - February 10, 2026
- Poet Liz Ahl Beats the Bounds - February 5, 2026
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