Selected Poems - (New California Poetry) by Fanny Howe (Paperback)
$26.95 when purchased online
Target Online store #3991
About this item
Highlights
- One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.
- Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 2001 1st Winner
- About the Author: Fanny Howe is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
- 213 Pages
- Poetry, American
- Series Name: New California Poetry
Description
About the Book
"Fanny Howe's strangely hushed but busy landscape keeps leading us into it until we realize we're lost but wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This book is a strange joy."--John Ashbery"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in these poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it does."--Robert Creeley
"Fanny Howe is a sly, wicked poet, always shifting between the social, the political, as well as the linguistic and literary concerns of an artist always writing from the cutting edge."--Quincy Troupe
"Fanny Howe is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since Dickinson herself. These taut and sometimes witty poems are centripetal; they inscribe moments of a spiritual and psychological quest, word by packed word, image by edged image."--Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
"Fanny Howe writes against the grain of language and the mind. These serial works, collected from a lifetime's steady contemplation, weave piece by piece a texture of such difficulty. Most religious poetry stands on faith, emotion, or certainty; Howe's work begins and ends with questions, and immense interiority in the shape of the physical world itself."--Norman Fischer, Co-abbot, San Francisco Zen Center
"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.' Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer, author of "The Lion Bridge"
Book Synopsis
One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.
Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.
The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:
Zero built a nest
in my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too-
From violent actions
It's a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own
-from The Quietist
From the Back Cover
"Fanny Howe's strangely hushed but busy landscape keeps leading us into it until we realize we're lost but wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This book is a strange joy."--John Ashbery"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in these poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it does."--Robert Creeley
"Fanny Howe is a sly, wicked poet, always shifting between the social, the political, as well as the linguistic and literary concerns of an artist always writing from the cutting edge."--Quincy Troupe
"Fanny Howe is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since Dickinson herself. These taut and sometimes witty poems are centripetal; they inscribe moments of a spiritual and psychological quest, word by packed word, image by edged image."--Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
"Fanny Howe writes against the grain of language and the mind. These serial works, collected from a lifetime's steady contemplation, weave piece by piece a texture of such difficulty. Most religious poetry stands on faith, emotion, or certainty; Howe's work begins and ends with questions, and immense interiority in the shape of the physical world itself."--Norman Fischer, Co-abbot, San Francisco Zen Center
"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.' Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer, author of The Lion Bridge
Review Quotes
"This beautifully designed and produced book is the third in a series called New California Poetry from the University of California Press. On the dust jacket, one person compares Fanny Howe to Emily Dickinson, a comparison all too easily invoked for writings by women. But in this case, there is justification."--"The Nation, on winning the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
About the Author
Fanny Howe is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and poetry (most recently, One Crossed Out, 1997).Dimensions (Overall): 8.03 Inches (H) x 4.92 Inches (W) x .69 Inches (D)
Weight: .59 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 213
Genre: Poetry
Sub-Genre: American
Series Title: New California Poetry
Publisher: University of California Press
Format: Paperback
Author: Fanny Howe
Language: English
Street Date: April 11, 2000
TCIN: 84271700
UPC: 9780520222632
Item Number (DPCI): 247-01-4719
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
If the item details above aren’t accurate or complete, we want to know about it.
Shipping details
Estimated ship dimensions: 0.69 inches length x 4.92 inches width x 8.03 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 0.59 pounds
We regret that this item cannot be shipped to PO Boxes.
This item cannot be shipped to the following locations: American Samoa (see also separate entry under AS), Guam (see also separate entry under GU), Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico (see also separate entry under PR), United States Minor Outlying Islands, Virgin Islands, U.S., APO/FPO
Return details
This item can be returned to any Target store or Target.com.
This item must be returned within 90 days of the date it was purchased in store, shipped, delivered by a Shipt shopper, or made ready for pickup.
See the return policy for complete information.