Reviews
Reaching back through Hawthorne, Dickinson and beyond, Susan Howe taps a stream of American thinking that is as as clear and fresh as a draught of well water. She is our conscience, our voice, our song., No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention., The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement., Howe''s words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another room--except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable., As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America''s uneasy commerce with the word., Howe's words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another room--except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable., Monomania has its rewards--an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest., Marvelous with a visionary apprehension of what is to come, telepathic communication with past poetries, histories, lives, material and spiritual realities., Universally recognized as a major poet, Susan Howe should also be known as the most innovative, the most thrilling essayist writing today., An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality., As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America's uneasy commerce with the word., Howe's brilliant, idiosyncratic essay is--like much of her work--a combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks., Monomania has its rewards--an incantatory power that shines through. Howe''s images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest., She manages to balance the most cerebral passages with a sharp eye for just the right detail...Howe is not for casual readers, but serious ones will be amply rewarded.
