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A celebration of language by a gifted poet. ... Read more

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Penetrating words beyond form
It's hard to believe so much intensity of word can be found in a slim volume of poetry, but Susan Howe here creates a magical world populated by a non-stop series of singularly perceptive lines.Those not familiar with her work will find a startling ability to capture meaning in disparate ways.Her complete power over words as objects can jar your senses into new meaning.

elevated by time
elevated by time distance distance and more distance-- dogma is pristine history is pristine therefore... I couldn't find any mention of Romance Novels or Safeway in the book. American History? Plenty of"original" history.O.J. Simpson is not original historyaccording to this book. Ask yourself what would be excluded by this book. Ask yourself this of any writing. American History? Pre-revolution. Itbegins at the beginning. Where am I? Here.The book is there.Americanhistory.Vietnamese-American history? hardly.Ask what gets excluded. ... Read more

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"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York SunWith exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Her Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry—no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, Wuthering Heights, the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun."

A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award. ... Read more

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Oddly composed, but with a few fine opals inside...
I have been pretty much obsessed with Emily Dickinson since 1980, and have enjoyed reading many treatments of her life and her poems, while enduring many other books about her. She is quite a mystery, and shall always remain so, becoming the kind of woman and poet that each generation seems to need. I did not like this author's prose style, which seemed to me to have many sentence fragments and many abrupt transitions which did not seem logical. However, it does contain one of the best meditations on Emily's literary and theological influences, including the preacher Jonathan Edwards, and the Brownings, and the Brontes, and Shakespeare. For that reason, it is worth reading if you care about the Belle of Amherst at all. I found myself drawn to her poetry from high school on, but over the decades, becoming much more fascinated with her life choices and experiences. We will never know for sure how many poems are autobiographical, how many actually describe her take on the experiences of her small but intense social circle, and how many are pure fiction. What an impact she has made on the literary world, by living the life of a fairly affluent New England spinster who did not get out much. That is endlessly fascinating to me. Unfortunately it is not the thrust of this volume. My recommendation is to start with Richard Sewell's huge biography of Emily from the 1970's. It covers the life AND the poetry in a reasonable and accessible manner. Some think Emily a secular nun, some think her a deeply closeted lesbian and/or incest victim, some feel she had many love affairs but was discrete about them. Some think her insane, some believe her to be the sanest of us all. Some find her an early feminist, and others see her as an oppressed woman. This book is one fellow female poet's appreciation of Emily's talents and circumstances. Wait another year and another scholar will present a different view. Emily left us 1,776 poems, give or take a few hidden in the text of letters, and someday there will be 1,776 books about her.

My Emily Dickinson
This book is not for the faint of intellect.It is a challenging book for most readers, I believe. Ms. Howe takes you on a poetic journey well worth taking.

Very Interesting Take
This book does more than just explore Dickinson's life and poetics, although it does that expertly. It falls in line with a tradition of books of poets writing about poets who have intensely figured in their conception of poetry. This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language. It's a place to meet Dickinson at as she was a lover of games and words.

If you think you know Emily...
This is a serious and personal literary study of Dickinson's work by a scholar and fellow poet who appreciates both the art and the attitude of one of her American literary forebears.

Howe points out how Dickinson'spoetry has been overlooked in light of her character and biography. Itseems that in the 19th century, it was remarkable for a woman to be a poetat all, let alone write original, rebellious, and quite modern poetry.Hence, the work itself, though enjoyed by schoolchildren all over America,has been little understood.

Delving into Dickinson's reading lists, hernotes and letters, and analyzing a few poems, Howe explores the workings ofan intricate mind. She uncovers connections between Dickinson and theBrownings, the Brontes, and James Fenimore Cooper, and she shows howseemingly submissive, soft spoken poetic lines are actually rebellious andeven at times angry. What Howe does not do is confuse the image of"The Belle of Amhearst" with the vital workings of the mind ofthis remarkable woman.

This book is an enjoyable read filled with Howe'sadmiration for her artistic predecessor and written in straightforwardlanguage, not literary jargon--a tribute from one poet to another. Foranyone who enjoys Emily Dickinson's poetry, it is not to be missed. ... Read more

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Unavailable for years, The Europe of Trusts contains some of the most acclaimed poetry of Susan Howe, "one of America's foremost experimental writers" (Publishers Weekly). The Europe of Trusts contains three brilliant, landmark books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980s: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. These are the books—following her volumes from the previous decade (Hinge Picture, Chanting at the Crystal Sea, Cabbage Gardens, and Secret History of the Dividing Line)—which established Howe as one of America's most interesting and important contemporary writers. "Her work," as Geoffrey O'Brien put it, "is a voyage of reconnaissance in language, a sounding out of ancient hiding places, and it is a voyage full of risk. 'Words are the only clues we have,' she has said. 'What if they fail us?'" ... Read more

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A poetic re-piecing of history.The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. How is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought." ... Read more

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"Moats of mystery"
Buy this if for nothing but "Melville's Marginalia," an astounding combination of mystery and poetry.Although the version of "Eikon Basilike" is not quite as impressive as the separate printing by paradigm press, it's still essential reading for those who think poetry is based on sound alone.Her sense of the visual and her ability to spin a web are what are sure to make this book appealing to any reader. ... Read more

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A stimulating examination of early American literature ... Read more

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Illuminating the Literary Wilderness
For those who have read Susan Howe's poetry and marvelled at, but did not fully understand it, this book is compelling in its explanatory power.The quotations in the preface alone are worth the price of admission, for it is here than one can see how impressive is her understanding of Emily Dickinson's writing.By exposing the manuscript story behind Dickinson's works, Susan Howe has made a lasting contribution to American literature.Her essay on Cotton Mather is a charmer, certain to drive readers to find a copy of his Magnalia.The essay Incloser is a stylistic dynamo.There is also an interview with the author that sheds new light on her works.

But what will make this book immortal is Susan Howe's essay These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values.To anyone who has read Emily Dickinson's poems in a "standard" or "variorum" edition of any sort, this book is a must, because you will soon learn that you have not, in fact, been reading Dickinson's words, but instead an editor's (inaccurate) version of them (whether Johnson or Franklin).Susan Howe demonstrates with a clarity and perception unmatched by any editor how the only way to understand and fully appreciate Emily Dickinson is by reading her manuscripts, some of which are reproduced in this book.And the manuscripts only make one appreciate more intensely the achievement of Emily Dickinson.If you've read Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, you must buy this book, as it completes the true story.It is a staggering achievement that will long be remembered as a landmark event in the understanding of America's greatest poet.American academia owes Susan Howe a debt of incalculable magnitude for this essay alone.

(Note on the other review of this book: how anyone can give this book fewer than 5 stars is a mystery.Susan Howe is a marvelous storyteller with a breadth of interests that cannot fail to intrigue even the most casual reader.)

Nettles and Brambles Feminine
You'll never read a book the same way again after "The Birth-mark"--you'll wonder about all the spaces, dashes, deletions and marginalia that didn't make it from manuscript to print.For Howe that's where the wild voices hide, dangerous figures like Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson and Emily Dickinson who threatened "civilized" male control.Howe samples texts like a hip-hop DJ, switching between voices to prove her point that editing was a typically male response to the wilderness that women (and the New World) represented.

Howe's passion for her subject is obvious, especially in the interview at the end.But the essays sometimes felt to me at least more like a display of cleverness than an effort to understand the figures she writes about.Like Charles Olson's "Call Me Ishmael," Howe's model, "The Birth-mark" squats a little uneasily between scholarship and poetry.The poet's own voice and sense of style tend to muffle the more distant Puritan voices, male and female, she's out to recover.Maybe this is the danger of not editing one's voice as a historian.Still, I'm glad I read this book--yet another reminder of what doesn't get into history and why. ... Read more

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pleasing appreciation
Here's a fleet review of some of Susan Howe's poetic sequences. Rachel T. Back writes intelligently about the poems and affectionately. For some of the poems there is no best method of approach but Back offers some helpful paths. Items of Howe's own past are revealed, but most of this information exists elsewhere in "My Emily Dickinson" and "The Birth Mark". Howe's faithful readers and the curious will enjoy, however, and be enlightened by this thoughtful book. ... Read more

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Pierce-Arrow, Susan Howe's newest book of poems, takes as its shooting off point the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishments yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing. Through Peirce and his wife Juliette, a lady of shadowy antecedents, Howe creates an intriguing nexus that explores the darker, melancholy sides of the fin-de-sicle Anglo-American intellegentsia. Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rckenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Romancing the Microfilm
"Pierce-Arrow" has a reach and ambition few books of history (or poetry for that matter) can match. Howe makes fascinating use of biographical fragments from the lives of American philosopher Charles S. Pierce and his 'gypsy' wife Juliette, George Meredith, A.C. Swinburne, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander Pope, and Theodore Watts-Dunton, with dollops of Husserl, the Iliad, and the Tristan & Isolde story thrown in for good measure. All these figures turn out to be connected in a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and the incidents Howe picks from their lives conform to a similar pattern: undisputed brilliance, Establishment rejection, long-suffering wives or caretakers, dangerous loves, ignominious deaths.

Howe's out to bring the archives to life in a way that recovers one of the poet's most ancient roles: to give a voice to the dead. But the connections she makes can seem so eccentric, so much like facts pulled out of a hat, that the work risks becoming a celebration of her own enthusiasm rather than an insight into her subjects' lives. In the end, I learned a lot more about Susan Howe's obsessions than I did about Charles Pierce's. That's certainly Howe's right as an author, but it tends to unfairly reduce Pierce's life and work to a pre-text for her own poetic concerns. Then again, I can't think of a poet since Pound or Olson doing anything this audacious with the archives. Her book is an absorbing, sometimes maddening attempt to transform neglected microfilm into myth.

Breathtaking purity of linguistic vision
The author relies on her astonishing sense of sight and sound to produce a work of genius.At once transcending the notion of manuscript and propelling words beyond the limitations of poetic form, this book is as compelling as a narrative of the enigmatic Peirce as it is an experiment in the luxury of license.Her view of the poem as a visual object finds clear expression here amid the startling contrasts and congruencies of words.And she saves the best for last: the poem Ruckenfigur can't fail to impress, its angularity and perception bringing forth analogies to Alice Fulton.This book's beauty cannot fail to captivate. ... Read more

Product Description
New poetry and prose from a most acclaimed experimental American poet.

In The Midnight's five sections, three of poetry and two of prose amply illustrated with images Susan Howe has collected, we find bed hangings, unfinished lace, ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Olmsted—a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With an inspired and inimitable verbal energy which takes on shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialog in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other. ... Read more

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Hanging In The Balance
Just about the best of Howe's recent books THE MIDNIGHT is jampacked with allusion, drama, and poetry, sometimes withdrawn seductively from the reader, hidden in a clutch of quotations, and at other times lowered, as if from a great heught, tantalizingly in your face.She has always been one to look underneath the surface of things; as an actress her training was in the Poets Theater of Cambridge, and her mother was the famous Mary Manning of Dublin's Abbey Theater.Thus there's a tendency to examine, sometimes at length, the underside of process, the thickness of what we do and especially what we say, when writing takes place, as the wind that reveals the silver underside of the leaves we'd otherwise never notice.

THE MIDNIGHT is fairly shaking with sadness, regret, and the stern obligations of memory, as Howe again scans the marginalia of another.This time it's her late uncle and the books he left behind in a seemingly otherwise blank (or pathetic) existence, specifically his copies of R L Stevenson-the novelist admired above all others by Howe's hero Henry James.As she turns the pages of the novel, parts of her uncle's life (and family photographs) seem to pop out like something from a Nick Bantock novel, but it's all part of Howe's finely tuned poetry machine, the unexpected choice of word and quotation, the sizzle of disjunction and more than anything else, the shiver of anticipation that one is getting something from this poetry unavailable elsewhere, a direct pipeline into a strain of American experience that the past has otherwise denied us.It's suspenseful, and fun too, like an Indiana Jones movie.Don't let people tell you differently.

"Syllabic magic"
The verbal shades/shards are here accompanied by intrigue in the form of photographs.Pictures of books, books depicted in her words.That combination makes this book something unexpected, though we expect and are rewarded by her challenges.Traversing from abandoned concrete and a forgotten train station in Buffalo to the closed cloister where Emily Dickinson's manuscripts are kept, and many other places in between, the range of subjects and objects here does not fail to hold the reader.How such wideness of topic can be spun into such compelling narrative is the mystery we admire.And there is humor here, also.So this could be a good first book of hers to read, or it could be said to pick up where Pierce-Arrow left off, with a thread or two from Frame Structures and Bed Hangings pursued to even greater effect.Buy, enjoy, learn from this book. ... Read more

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Souls of the Labadie Tract finds Susan Howe exploring (or unsettling) one of her favorite domains, the psychic past of America. This time the presiding tutelary geniuses are Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens.
Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and material scraps. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress which ends the book.
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True wildness
Archival excerpts from early Colonial history populate this space, energize it to starry heights.Susan notes "I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertaintly that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed they would appear to expand though they lay half-smothered in local history."We, the recipients of the unearthing, appreciate her brilliance.Those who recall Singularities will find refuge in the verses of 118 Westerly Terrace, such as "
Low in self abasement light
passes through linen as if
to offer heaven as if roof
will have no hold against
one hour shred of another
"
Emily Dickinson walks these pages also, as in "
For a long time I worked
this tallest racketty poem
by light of a single candle
"
The last page of this book fades with a trace of some mysterious writing, but does not bestow darkness.
She speaks of "concrete totality of singular interjections, crucified spellings, abbreviations, irrationalapprehensions"..."details to oratorically bloom" and so they do, in this fine work. ... Read more

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early poems 1974-1979 ... Read more

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Beyond compare
Although this volume contains her earlier works, Frame Structures is supplemented by a more recent essay that provides a wealth of information about her personal life, and in doing so enriches the poems within.Those unfamiliar with Susan Howe's work may find this to be a good introduction.Her unsurpassed ability to combine prose and poetry make this a delight for the eyes.What we see is a constancy of purpose, a dazzling command of language, and an impressive storytelling ability. ... Read more

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In pursuing Susan Howe s own writing through words of her literary predecessors, Collis ranges deep in and beyond the American archive s wilderness, catching sight of various elusive quarry: Charles Olson and Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Fuller; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, James Clarence Mangan and William Shakespeare. At the heart of this are the simple literary exchanges embodied here in a selection of correspondence between Howe and Olson editor George Butterick that remind us that poets invariably find their poetry in other poets poetry, that the future is waiting for us in the past, and that no original or origin is ultimately possible. ... Read more

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Gifted, sensitive poet
Poetry is highly personal. Howe has a voice that penetrates deeply, for meand for many of the other poetry-loving friends who have read this book.Howe's work is not harsh, hard or cynical. She speaks to the meditative,the gently ironic, and the essentially life-affirming sides of myconsciousness. She combines deep compassion with a masterful command of thelanguage. What an accomplished wordsmither. Definitely worth a try. ... Read more

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Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of noncanonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their tradition and disassociated from their culture. The line of American poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but deconstructive aspect that emphasized the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openess of the creative process. ... Read more

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General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1908Original Publisher: The Rural Publishing Co.Subjects: Biography ... Read more

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The best series for LDS women!
All of the books from the BYU Women's Conference are wonderful, uplifting, entertaining, and surprisingly candid. ... Read more