The Midnight

by Susan Howe

Overview

New poetry and prose from a most acclaimed experimental American poet.

In The Midnight's amply illustrated five sections, three of poetry and two of prose, we find—swirling around the poet's mother—ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, bed hangings, unfinished lace, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, the Yeats brothers, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Frederick Law Olmsted: a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811215381
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/2003
Series:	New Directions Paperbook Series , #956
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	442,783
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"The germ of this extraordinary book is an elegy for the poet's mother, the Irish actress and playwright Mary Manning. But in The Midnight, 'elegy' resides in the space between verse and prose, word and image, text and textile, lyric and narrative, the everyday and the fantastic, Ireland and the United States. Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge."

Marjorie Perloff

"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."

The Boston Review - John Palattella

Howe continues to unsettle easy assumptions about contemporary experimental American poetry, and, simultaneously, origin myths of the U.S., with carefully measured doses of early history, national and personal: "I am assembling materials for a recurrent return somewhere. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous. Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced." More immediately autobiographical and less uniform than books like The Europe of Trusts or Pierce-Arrow, Howe's latest can seem scattered on a first reading, but soon resolves itself into a remarkably cohesive invitation to imagine oneself into historical roles that have been laid away in books: "Come away-This way, this way-Calvinists, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, Shakers, Sandemans, Rosicrucians, Pietists, reformers, pilgrims, traveling preachers, strolling players, peddlers, pirates, captives, mystics, embroiderers, upholsterers, itinerant singers, penmen, imposters." Howe finds resonance in the smallest inscription on a family ledger, taking as guidance Emersonian aphorism: "The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought." The smallest details thus come to replace the big picture, as when hearing a midnight sound "echoed and re-echoed only." Like Agnes Varda in her film The Gleaners and I, Howe demonstrates that the artist's unpredictable path to knowledge, generous in its digressions and attentions to the obscure, is revealing, suspenseful and necessary. (May 23) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Howe alternates poetry, prose, and visuals to produce a phatasmagoric work that investigates our cultural roots. Adventurous readers shouldn't miss. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal