The Needle's Eye
Passing through Youth
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)
Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge "from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." As the philosopher Richard Kearney writes, "Howe's ruminations and aesthetics are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats." The Needle's Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, "recognized as one of the country's least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers" (The Boston Globe).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howe (Second Childhood: Poems) draws on over four decades as an acclaimed poet and fiction writer to seamlessly braid lyric and essayistic modes in her third nonfiction collection, a meditation on the pressures and formative friendships of youth. Without positing explicit correlations, Howe reprises several familiar tales of young people moved to action variously compassionate or violent by their radical faith, including Francis of Assisi, Brigid of Ireland, Simone Weil, and more recently, the Tsarnaev brothers behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Citing an Uzbek folktale in which two teenage boys set off on adventures together, seeking "to transcend and escape the ugly fate of adults," Howe affirms that this story "could be told in any culture; and has been." Moving from literary invocation (she brings in influences as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Marcel Proust, and W.B. Yeats) to lush, filmic description (citing a roster of filmmakers from around the world), Howe attempts and often brilliantly, obliquely manages to capture those qualities of youth that age inevitably dulls: the passions that doom, save, or at least alter the course of our adulthoods. Her encompassing knowledge (she can furnish an anecdote or datum to illustrate nearly any idea, from the neuroscientific to the devotional) and empathic vision will make readers believe her pronouncement: "History is the top god of the secular world."
