Reviews
Howe's telepathic poetry is also the most attentive to materiality: handwriting, spacing, the slightest fold or crevice which might contain fragments, marginalia, a scribble of poesy. And that's just it--Howe's attention is the essential rigor of all poetry., Debths is a fascinating look at art across time. Howe adroitly brings into conversation both identified and unknown source material to create a finely woven exploration of narrative and transmission anchored in the American past and future....composed of elements from her own childhood, the art of Paul Thek, draft annotations of late Yeats, fairy tales, dictionary entries, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum...the resulting counterpoint is quite complex, but it is ultimately one of strange consonance that rings true in the same way as a story too strange to have been invented., Howe's telepathic poetry is also the most attentive to materiality:handwriting, spacing, the slightest fold or crevice which might containfragments, marginalia, a scribble of poesy. And that's just it--Howe'sattention is the essential rigor of all poetry., Howe should be read in the company of Pound, Stevens, Stein, Ashbery and other American poets who reconfigured the ground rules of their art. With her long career in view today, her comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: 'A great poet, carrying the antique imagination of her fathers, requires of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered, and sovereign. She carries intelligence of the past into future of our thought by reverence and revolt., For nearly thirty years,Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundlyvisionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by apassionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power., The intertextual erudition underpinning all of Howe's work is enabled--and ultimately exceeded--by an unquenchable and wide-eyed curiosity, an infinitely open-ended empathy, and the fervent belief in the notion that 'only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals.', A fresh occasion not just to celebrate Howe, who turned seventy-eight this year, but also to read her anew, which is the more formidable and ultimately more rewarding charge. Wildly and wantonly she is bringing everything to the table, including poetry, history, research, politics, autobiography, imagination, obsession and love, all the while demonstrating how strange, puzzling, and untamed writing and thinking can be., Howe is among the worthiest heirs to the high-modernist line in American poetry, interested in the accidents, smudges, and tears that fasten works of literature to their material embodiments on the page. Howe's own 'American aesthetic of uncertainty,' shuttles among forms, genres, and states of matter. What connects it all are Howe's powers of insight, and the implied relations between her sparkling trouvailles., Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge., Debths is a fascinating look at art across time. Howe adroitly brings into conversation both identified and unknown source material to create a finely woven exploration of narrative and transmission anchored in the American past and future....composed of elements from her own childhood, the art of Paul Thek, draft annotations of late Yeats, fairy tales, dictionary entries, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum...the resulting counterpoint is quite complex, but it is ultimately one of strange consonance that rings true in the same way as a story too strange to have been invented., Coming after the publication of over thirty books and chapbooks, it is difficult not to read Debths, Susan Howe's first full-length collection of poetry since Spontaneous Particulars in 2014, as the culminating gesture of her remarkable career. Indeed, Howe, who turns eighty this year, has suggested it is likely her last book. If this is so, I can think of no better way to crown her many decades wandering through the American literary wilderness: Debths reads like the crescendo at the conclusion of a symphony. It is a profound synthesis of Howe's obsessions, methods, and concerns as a writer--a recursive loop back through her oeuvre, but also a renewal of its main lines, drawing the various threads together into a tighter weave. Howe's writing is as vital now as it has ever been., For nearly thirty years,Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundlyvisionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by apassionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power., Debths is a fascinating look at art across time. Howe adroitlybrings into conversation both identified and unknown source material tocreate a finely woven exploration of narrative and transmission anchoredin the American past and future....composed of elements from her ownchildhood, the art of Paul Thek, draft annotations of late Yeats, fairytales, dictionary entries, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum...theresulting counterpoint is quite complex, but it is ultimately one ofstrange consonance that rings true in the same way as a story toostrange to have been invented., Monomania has itsrewards--an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, beinghistorical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghostshalf-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borgesat his sharpest.
