Selected Poems

The author of more than 20 books of poetry and fiction, Howe is here revealed to be working out a project of enormous consistence, clarity and grace. In 16 serial poems culled from small-press releases over the last 20-plus years, Howe (One Crossed-Out, etc.) has staked out an idiom that permits an impressive range of experience to enter the simple church-like structures of the poems, allowing them to move back and forth between a transparent self and ideas of transcendence: ""Every glance works its way to infinity./ But blue eyes don't make blue sky./ Outside a grey washed world, snow all diffused into steam/ and glaucoma. My vagabondage/ is unlonelined by poems."" A religious metaphor is not inapt, as several of the poems directly concern or address a God, but do so with a mix of archaism and skepticism that purposefully makes the distance too big to bridge fully, as in ""The Quietist"": ""Mad God, mad thought/ Take me for a walk/ Stalk me. Made God,/ Wake me with your words./ Believe in what I said."" A feminist thinking-through drives poems like ""Conclusively"" (""I was eliminated as a locus of mothering"") and ""The Vineyard,"" which contemplates indentured servitude, ""a workplace torn by a union"" and how ""Love's body and mouth lie down together/ It's hidden parts soft inside."" ""The Sea-Garden"" looks autobiographically back to childhood, where ""hottentot figs/ Burst green water."" Sensuous and intellectual pleasures commingle beautifully here, showing most recent conventional lyric to be sorely lacking in imagination. This collection should bring Howe the readership she deserves. (Apr.)