Love and I
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The newest collection from “one of America’s most dazzling poets” (O, The Oprah Magazine)
Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of “pure seeing” and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.
Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
