This Poor Book
A Poem
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Celebrated poet Fanny Howe’s final book, a kaleidoscopic recasting of her twenty-first-century poems
For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.
These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction—leading us between doubt and belief and toward Howe’s enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Completed before her death at 84 in 2025, the final volume by Howe (Manimal Woe) is a clear-eyed compilation of her work from the past 30 years. She is by turns funny ("I need a safe place/ to go crazy in. Is this it?"), prophetic ("Why mercy?// Having mercy is easier than forgiving them"), and musical ("The streets were full of the thundering young/ who stamp their heels/ to make us move along/ as if we were the starved gone/ who couldn't climb down/ a long ramp underground or up the stairs to bed"). "This is such an old story, listen," Howe writes. "The poor are hard-working/ And the rich get more through talking." The collection repeatedly returns to themes of spiritual pursuit, attempting to reconcile the Catholic tradition to which Howe converted in the 1970s ("Patch up the cracks in the Catholic Church! It's falling down") with the reality of widespread suffering in a world still in need of saving. But Howe offers rousing comfort: "To those I would die for/ Please be patient/ It's summer somewhere/ I hear good things." She captures the tumult of the age in this astonishing book.
