What the Living Do: Poems

Loss is inevitable in our lives and the pieces in this book describe how the poet survives it, the loss of a brother, a father, a love. It is personal and universal at the same time. I loved The Copper Beech, "it wore that yard like a dress/with limbs low enough for me to enter it/ and climb a ladder to where/ I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone." I've lost a sister, a father, a mother, a friend. The poems had a quietude to them, no crash or thunder. I felt so much the same in my grief, the long lingering of it. I could relate to this work. You might too.

"Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost." Marie Howe captures the gut feelings of living in her striking book of poetry. The pain of losing her brother to AIDs resonates through the later poems, while the earlier focus on the manic emotions of childhood. Even people uncomfortable with poetry will enjoy reading the universal memories she's translated so touchingly into the written word. This is not esoteric verse: it is clean, familiar, moving moments of time frozen under the glass of a copyright. Howe expresses just what the living do as a melody that swoops and soars. She also underscores her poetry with a deep harmony indicative of the void in life, a hole in one's heart that was once devoted to a loved one. "But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living, I remember you."

It's rare that a book of contemporary poetry strikes a chord so deep. Howe's, "What the Living Do" is, fortunately, one of those books. Her poetry is naked with emotion and speaks clearly "without irony or condescension." I found "My Dead Friends" to be one of the best. Buy this book. Take it with you on a walk. Sit outside and read in one sitting. You won't be disappointed.

I have been carrying around a copy of the title poem from this book ever since I saw it in the Atlantic years ago - and waiting and waiting for Howe's second book to come out. It's worth the wait - a chilling and stunning and beautiful collection of poems, written so straightforwardly, as if Howe were just talking to herself as she walked down the street, or to us over coffee. It takes very hard work to make poetry sound so open and easy, and the style is exactly right for the seriousness of her subject(s): death, child abuse, love. Marie Howe is able to hold the pain in her heart up to the light, and is generous enough to let us stand there for a while with her.

People have often told me that hearing the word "poetry" sets off high school nightmares of having to "interpret" or decode literature. Such reactions never cease to disappoint me, considering everyone first experiences language through poetry, the playfulness of words. The innate melodies and rhythms that those first tunes bring to life in our early years are revived in Marie Howe's second book of poetry "What the Living Do". Striving for relentless clarity of language and image, Howe has written a painful celebration of "what the living do" after the death of a loved one. These verses, however, are by no means juvenile, confronting head-on the life and death of her brother John as well as the death of poet Jane Kenyon. And amid the suffering Howe's poetry insists there is room for love, for making love. Whatever loss that the poet endures because of her brother's death is countered (complemented perhaps) by her ability to be intimate and inexorably human amid the living. The poems are powerfully memorable, pushing for an aesthetic that is personal yet connective, accessible yet multi-layered. Writing in a language that is uniquely hers and yet entirely ours for the taking, Marie Howe's "What the Living Do" instructs us on how she has found that both praise and misery can undoubtedly inhabit the same swirling space.

Each of these poems chronicles the luminescence and the darkness of every day life. This collection also embodies a spiritual core, one that speaks to the complexity of the end of this century. Grace and forgiveness are earned through the unrelenting honesty of these lines. It is the sacred in these poems which will make it the collection and Howe the poet of our time. The discipline of Howe's writing, of her thinking, require a delibrateness of craft. Long lines and short bring the conversation of the everyday to a precision often missed in contemporary American poetry. This collection will speak to so many people: writers, those who rarely read to those who would never read poetry, to the finest craftsmen, and anyone who seeks the sacred in life.