Penitential Cries

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/VOELKER AWARD FOR POETRY What labor to live forever. Speak of the elect what can you do in all this world so much life in the little of it.  In four parts, Susan Howe’s new book opens with the arresting long prose poem “Penitential Cries,” followed by a group of word-collages “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in “the evening of life,” Howe quotes Thomas Wyatt: My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She says: “I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven,” the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, “I want to express my pilgrim's progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It's getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming.”

About the Author :
Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.

Review :
"Howe should be read in the company of Pound, Stevens, Stein, Ashbery, and other American poets who reconfigured the ground rules of their art. With her long career in view today, her comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: ‘A great poet, carrying the antique imagination of her fathers, requires of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered, and sovereign. She carries intelligence of the past into the future of our thought by reverence and revolt.’" "Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry.  She’s a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’s rejuvenating power." "An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition…. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality." "This spare and arresting collection from Howe comprises four series poems that address aging, history, and the afterlives of texts and language... Howe reaffirms her position as a poet of the archives, bringing a new and enduring life to historical texts." "This collection marks more than fifty years of making and publishing by Howe, and she still surprises and yes, exults. " "Howe is patiently pressing sounds and voices together, keeping the edges frayed. Moments of pure lucidity cut through the prose like spring water." "Reading the work that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry... Howe is still fiercely shoring her fragments." "A deep dive into the existential core of life experience and poetic wisdom, seeking transcendence through bracing lyricism, ecstatic prose, and regenerative collage poems."