That This
Published on 26. July 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-0-8112-1918-1 (ISBN)
Description
"What treasures of knowledge we cluster around." That This is a collection in three pieces. "Disappearance Approach," an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death-"land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth"-begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. "Frolic Architecture," the second section-inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling-presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, "invisible" Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, "That This," delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:
That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of
Me mystically one in another
another another to subserve.
That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of
Me mystically one in another
another another to subserve.
Reviews / Votes
"For nearly thirty years, 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." -- John Palattella - The Boston Review "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." -- Artforum "Monomania has its rewards-an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie sharing of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest." -- Kirkus ReviewsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
Six black-and-white photographs
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 154 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
168 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-1918-1 (9780811219181)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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. James Welling, b. 1951, is an acclaimed experimental artist who employs a wide variety of photographic tools and media.