Howe is the author of more than 20 books, encompassing both fiction
and poetry, most of which have been published by small presses (the
most recent in 1997). This marks her first collection ofearlier and
more recent poems published by a university press. She is Professor
of Writing and Literature at the University of California at San
Diego. This volume traces the odyssey of Howe's evolution as a poet
over the past two decades, from Boston (the setting of some of her
earliest poems) to Ireland (her ancestral and spiritual homeland)
to California (her current home). Considered one of the leading
`experimental` poets in the US, Howe is noted for her spare, almost
austere style, yet there is much tenderness and even joy in life
expressed in these verses. At times she proves herself capable of
Zen-like detachment, as in her oft-quoted stanza, `Zero built a
nest in my navel.` But she occasionally loses that composure, as in
her lament that, `Loss is the fulfillment of the Law,` or when she
asks, `Why be obedient to a world that will end?` Her convictions
may appear tentative, but only because her reality remains nascent,
always in the process of becoming. She strives to get to the source
of meaning, to `concentrate on the consciousness the sea comes out
of.` She is not afraid to stare into the gaping maw of the horror
vacui, but, unlike a good many of her contemporaries, she does not
accept the over-the-counter existential palliatives. Howe's poetry
is fabricated from questions rather than certainties and arises,
like the revelations of more conventional mystics, from
contemplation in solitude. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Fanny Howe's strangely hushed but busy landscape keeps leading us
into it until we realize we're lost but wouldn't want to be
anywhere else. This book is a strange joy."--John Ashbery
"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final
resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in these
poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld
of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it
does."--Robert Creeley
"Fanny Howe is a sly, wicked poet, always shifting between the
social, the political, as well as the linguistic and literary
concerns of an artist always writing from the cutting
edge."--Quincy Troupe
"Fanny Howe is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since
Dickinson herself. These taut and sometimes witty poems are
centripetal; they inscribe moments of a spiritual and psychological
quest, word by packed word, image by edged image."--Albert Gelpi,
Stanford University
"Fanny Howe writes against the grain of language and the mind.
These serial works, collected from a lifetime's steady
contemplation, weave piece by piece a texture of such difficulty.
Most religious poetry stands on faith, emotion, or certainty;
Howe's work begins and ends with questions, and immense interiority
in the shape of the physical world itself."--Norman Fischer,
Co-abbot, San Francisco Zen Center
"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate,
spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter
and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is
to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness
and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The
poet is the sayer, the namer,and represents beauty.' Here's the
luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer, author of
"The Lion Bridge
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