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University of California Press

Selected Poems

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Title
Title: Selected Poems
Author: Fanny Howe
ISBN: 9780520222632
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2000
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 224
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: 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