Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-1979

This eagerly awaited edition brings back into print four of five long-poem chapbooks with which Howe moved from the visual arts into poetry. The interplay is readily apparent. Howe compresses her lines into ""fields"" of text, where rhymes and the ghost of the pentameter convincingly illustrate her preoccupation: how history lives through us, and vice versa, as we become ""a pure past that returns to itself unattackable in the framework"" of a poem. Though the details of her part-Anglo patrician, part-Irish immigrant heritage discussed in the long preface may seem like pedigree posturing, we slowly realize that for her, every historical figure is fascinating as a ""cinder of the lexical drift,"" a person who now lives only through our reading of them. The genius of poems like ""Hinge Picture,"" entering the terror and eros that created the Bible, and ""Secret History of the Dividing Line,"" which explores the beginnings of exile and nationhood, is in the impulsive and authentic voices (unlike those of Pound's Cantos) given these generative speakers. No nostalgia, wonder or prefab interpretations cloud the immediacy or exquisite lyricism of the better works here. We are struck by ""the war-whoop in each dusty narrative."" (May)