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A stirring, lyric new collection by Susan Howe, one of America's foremost poets.
What labor to live forever. Speak of the elect what can you do in all this world so much life in the little of it.
In four parts, Susan Howe's new book opens with the arresting long prose poem "Penitential Cries," followed by a group of word-collages "Sterling Park in the Dark," "The Deserted Shelf," and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in "the evening of life," Howe quotes Thomas Wyatt: My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She says: "I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven," the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, "I want to express my pilgrim's progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It's getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming."
"[A]rresting...Howe reaffirms her position as a poet of the archives, bringing a new and enduring life to historical texts." —Publishers Weekly
"Howe should be read in the company of Pound, Stevens, Stein, Ashbery, and other American poets who reconfigured the ground rules of their art. With her long career in view today, her comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: 'A great poet, carrying the antique imagination of her fathers, requires of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered, and sovereign. She carries intelligence of the past into the future of our thought by reverence and revolt." ―New York Review of Books
"Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power." ―Boston Review
This information about Penitential Cries was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.
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