EDITORS' CHOICE

Fanny Howe, Selected Poems. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000.

The efforts to comprehend both the earthly life and the life of the spirit, as well as the attempt to locate God in the midst of the quotidian, are united at the center of Howe’s Selected Poems—and the resulting marriage is the hub of all that matters on the small, clean pages that comprise this collection. Howe’s speaker isn’t coy. She makes her beliefs clear: the seeking, the finding, and the not-finding are inextricable, and are built-in—not adjunct to, but integral to, the life of the body and of the complications of living.

In “The Nursery” the idea is vibrantly evident:

One in one, we slept together
all sculpture
of two figures welded.
But the infant’s fingers
squeezed & kneaded
me, as if to show
the Lord won’t crush what moves
on its own. . . .

And, in “Introduction to the World,” she states, “ . . . The grace of God / Places a person in the truth / And is always expressed as a taste in the mouth.” “Human was God’s secret name,” she says in “O’Clock.” “Daily,” she says in “The Quietist,” “says ‘divine.’”

And the concept of unities is woven throughout in other contexts as well. You can see hints of it above: “One in one,” “two figures welded.” Howe speaks of sorrow, which “can be a home to stand on so / And see far to: another earth, a place I might know.” And in “Robeson Street” the impossibility of parsing, of fragmenting, is stated even more blatantly: “Three hundred and twenty eight more days / are due this year and even with that many lives / I’d still have only one history.”

The manner in which Howe manifests these totalities is surprising: In short segments of well-spaced short lines, these serial poems can easily tease or frustrate the unwary or arrogant reader. Their meticulous compressions lend themselves, often, to Dickinsonian ambiguities, the same heightened sense of intelligence and play. The fifth section of “The Vineyard” sets one instance out beautifully.

All night the rain

Pelts the big leaves
Kids are in peril skidding
In puddles cars turn over

Are the kids “skidding / In puddles”? or are the puddles where the “cars turn over”? The consistent left-margin capitalizations and the absence of line-end punctuations leave the reader suspended between the two possibilities. And that’s where Howe wants you: in the land between the questions and the answers. The section ends like this:

In each landscape weights and shapes
Repeat the Father’s name: Not-this-Not-that

Not-this-not-that. Not-here-not-there. It’s all one long one.

Between the unembellished disclosures, the sometimes nearly telegraphic elisions, and the erasures of boundaries, the reader is conscripted into the human spirit-searching of these not-quite-narratives and not-quite-monologues and/or meditations. The material of the poems is the life and the quest, certainly, but the real matter, the what-matters-most, is captured in the spaces where those two things rub together, the crevices where the frictions create philosophical heat.

This is not easy reading. There are uncrowded pages; lots of white space; words, primarily, of few syllables; lines of short duration; and whole serial poems themselves that appear to be small, single pieces headed not even by a title but by an asterisk or some small symbol. On the first few read-throughs I approached Howe’s work naïvely. And the work is not naïve.

In 1991, in an article in The New York Times Book Review, Mark Strand warned readers that they had to “slow down for poetry.” I think that, until now, I didn’t realize just how slowly a reader sometimes has to go. Howe’s work is not indecipherable by any means, but it is dense and thought-worthy and necessitates a slow, careful read. Or any number of slow, careful reads.

Howe is a religious poet who does not write conventionally religious poetry, neither the popular, gauzy verse of worship nor the didactic verse of definition; her poems are too deeply rooted in and controlled by the body’s life to be called religious poetry per se. Her poems are the poems of the seeking, of the obvious incorporation.

“Half of every experience,” she says near the end of the collection, “is lack of experience.” The concrete and the abstract are of one thing. What you know and what you don’t know are of one thing; you still have only “one history.” And in the face of this indivisibility, Howe, in “Lines Out of Silence,” tells us how she manages:

Now theology is necessary
for the way there are these holes and questions

“ . . . [T]he world in my eyes / is hardly a certainty,” she says near the beginning of the volume; and “ . . . [N]o answers, please, to any of my questions,” near the end. She knows how she must live and where—a special, difficult kind of wisdom: “—not here—not there—but always between.”

In her Selected Poems, she’ll take you to that between place. You’ll find assertions and questions, yes—not missing information, but mystery encoded and unembellished, a life alluded to, pondered and pressed into the service of the line and the poem and the discovery that is the selected poetic oeuvre, so far, of Fanny Howe.

Renée Ashley