Review by New York Times Review
Howe can be a challenging poet: prolific, willfully obscure, ensconced with Christianity. This book, however, is surprisingly accessible, a contemplation of how old age resembles childhood. Her notion that "We don't understand why we are here in the world/with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that/we're supposed to learn" could apply equally to the young and helpless or the old and infirm. On some subjects, she's easy to understand. Loneliness, she writes, "slips in beside you when you are not aware that a/choice you are making will have consequences." Her religious musings can be enthralling, as when she writes her own Gospels, fables of faith in which, for instance, she finds herself walking beside St. Francis as a boy. In some of her sequences of untitled verses, it's easy to get lost amid scraps of aphorism, flashes of day-to-day life, injunctions to the self that don't quite add up: "We drop the shadows where they are then/return to them/when the light has grown heavy." While I once counted this a flaw in her poetry, I've lately come to think of it as the real triumph of her art, which offers glimpses of the unseeable, shards of the unsayable, between the slats of the words, between meanings. Whether we see what this reflexive poetry tries to show may have more to do with our own sense of faith - in language, if not in God - than with hers.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 14, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
It's natural to assume that Howe's title, Second Childhood, refers to old age. If old age is a process of decline, it is also a casting or sloughing off, and can herald the arrival of a late style. Blake supplies Howe's epigraph: Fear & hope are Vision. The three long poems, The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams, Second Childhood, and A Vision, are visionary. They achieve their power through the juxtaposition of imagery in which accumulating observations outstrip moral and aesthetic concerns. By contrast, the lyrics are cut and polished. The line breaks are as sharp as the facets of gems, with rhymes that shine. An example is found in this stanza from Dear Holderlin: At the estuary nearby / two continents had split apart / and a curlew / flew alone and crying. Much honored, Howe received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement. She has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose. One hopes for many more of her extraordinary poems.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, Howe (Come and See) is masterfully lyrical in her newest collection, one marbled throughout with musings over identity. Howe navigates between indeterminate and shifting speakers and addressees with a wide array of tools, like obfuscating shadows, contradictions, and a precious, serene delicacy that channels a childlike marvel, contenting the speaker to present images without interrogation: "A pebbled island/ is a kind of barge:/ seaweed blackened/ another glacial strand.// White quartz.// Some green mermaid's tears." References to childhood, along with religion, are prevalent, such as in the title poem: "I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers/ questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window./ So I've asked her if I have a big ego and she swings/ from side to side to say no." Moreover, Howe complicates this type of pristine grace with rejection that perpetuates the speaker's curiosity in the lines that follow: "We don't understand why we are here in the world/ with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that/ we're supposed to learn./ It's not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in/ religious, geriatric or psychological terms." Howe may occupy some familiar and traditional poetic spaces, but she populates them beautifully. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
