From Publishers Weekly
Simultaneously tender, political, lyrical and global in scope, this set of short sequences from Howe (One Crossed Out) has at its core the belief that love plays a redemptive role at all scales of interaction, giving intense force to grapplings with intimacy: "I think proximity is the abyss/ between God and us because// every fabric of my body is trying/ to know why saying// I love you / in a time of extremity is a necessity." Howe buttresses details drawn from individual lives with explorations of good and evil not as justifications for action, but as things to know and act from: "I am no one./ I know hell and have hope." Though elsewhere Howe has reinvented Catholic imagery fascinatingly, her direct engagements of it here can be flat: "Satan announces himself without sense/ I am pro-life, I kill from a distance." "The Dragon of History" is similarly brittle, as are some of the explicit references to September 11, the Iraq War and the second intifada. But such facts on the ground carry an anger that in turn carries these poems throughout—"Not even a postage stamp/ and not the spit for it"—revealing connections between small and large, here and elsewhere, where "Time covered sky/ over multiple eyes."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.' Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer
Book Description
A spiritually resonant and politically urgent new collection by the winner of the Lenore Marshall poetry prize.
About the Author
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Gone, Selected Poems, One Crossed Out, and a collection of essays, The Wedding Dress.
She lives in New England.
She lives in New England.
