Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.
Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.
Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.
The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:
Zero built a nest
in my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too-
From violent actions
It's a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own
-from The Quietist
Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.
Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.
The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:
Zero built a nest
in my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too-
From violent actions
It's a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own
-from The Quietist
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0520222636
ISBN13:9780520222632
Release Date:April 2000
Publisher:University of California Press
Length:213 Pages
Weight:0.57 lbs.
Dimensions:0.7" x 4.9" x 8.0"
Related Subjects
PoetryCustomer Reviews
1 rating
The assembled wonder
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 24 years ago
The title of this book deceives. Indeed it is a "selected" but is no mere anthology of works. The poems are chosen from books spanning decades, but are re-ordered, re-sequenced, in some cases even excerpted out of longer poems to create a new--completely new--book.The poems are kept short. The compression serves to lull but release power at the same time. Imagine Fanny Howe whispering visions in your ear while you are in the dream-state between sleeping and waking.I love Fanny Howe because she has simultaneous concerns that never outweigh each other: a commitment to a first-person lyric while engaging the experiments of modernism and language-poetics, a mystical attention to religious experience coupled with a very real and political engagement with daily material condition, a fiesty resistance to form, but a conquest of that same territory.
Copyright © 2025 Thriftbooks.com
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information | Cookie Policy | Cookie Preferences | Accessibility Statement
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
