Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this spare yet substantial book, Howe (Gone) continues her lifelong adventure in bewilderment. True to the poet's established practice, sound is the internal force driving these poems: "Steps lowered and slimy// On a slip into the lagoon./ Ghoulish are the ghosts/ Of time past: ancestors/ With our same names." Often the metaphysical is juxtaposed against the physical ("Soon the filmy forms take an animal turn"), while in the poet's imagination, the conventional axes of time, place, and action converge, settle, and reform. "What if you think of time as a long and everlasting plain," the speaker proposes. Wild geese "herd the future," while distant pasts and immediate moments conflate: "Water was our first armor before our skin./ Then came the bristle of sunshine./ And a thickening of blood into oil/ Or syrup in the lower veins./ Covering up our prototypes.// Everything we saw, we became." World history, personal memory, and voices sampled from years of attentive listening come together in a book that presents the "Dirty and divine." Readers ready to suspend expectations about what and how poems mean will delight in the transformations happening in these pages. (Oct.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her 24th collection, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Lifetime Achievement award winner Howe searches for a philosophy of living: "What should we do? What can we do? Take off your shoes/ you've Walked far enough." Sometimes, the poet slyly pokes fun at life: "If a shoe is lying on a highway/ It indicates an accident." Some metaphors shimmer ("A bird's cherry-pit heart pulsed between two bones"). Yet others leave readers perplexed, "Their backpacks like skunks curled in the shade." Howe pays tribute to earlier artists and writers, such as the Black Mountain poets and a British Romantic: "I was tracking Blake on Primrose Hill/ one damp summer night./ Bundles of white chestnuts flared/ under the streetlights." Occasionally, the writing becomes clunky--breaking the reader's flow--as in the long poem, "Turbulence," where she writes, "A man might not want a child/ Because he has his brain to carry around." Line lengths vary, with some of the sparsest ones communicating the most, as in the poem "No Beginning": "Home?/ In." Many of the poems center on travel and range from a melancholic recollection of babyhood to a series examining experiences while flying and touring foreign places. "Time was vertical. Is, and past perfect." In the end, Howe is best at capturing the everyday: "Downstairs, cries of lust./ Up here, a requiem mass/ And light to lead the clouds home." VERDICT In nearly every poem, the poet delves deeply. Her questing invites us to read and reread. For all academic and larger public library collections.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
