On the Ground</a> <link rel='stylesheet' href='http://thomasdevaney.net/style.css' type='text/css' /> </head> <body> <table width="600" align="center" border="3" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="6"> <tr><td> <p><img src="http://thomasdevaney.net/imgs/sm_logo_inquirer.jpg" /> <h3><i>On the Ground</i></h3> <p align="left"><i>Fanny Howe <br />Graywolf Press <br />$14 (64 Pages) <br />Reviewed by Thomas Devaney <br />from </i>The Philadelphia Inquirer </p> <p> <p>Poet Fanny Howe's new collection <i> On the Ground</i> confirms that she is one of boldest lyric poets in the United States. Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her <i>Selected Poems</i> (2000) was the recipient of the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 2001. Howe's bracing new poems respond with moving clarity to the contrast between the current sweeping political tides and the realities of life lived "on the ground." </p> <p>In the title poem of her new collection, a serial poem "On the Ground,"<i> </i> she writes:</p> <blockquote><p>So go away before I ask to know <p>what you mean about wanting to go <p>Terrified of being first? <br>of being dirt? <p>Of being ambushed or embossed? Personally <br>I want to batter my way out of this cage of psychology <p>and get to the longing I really know about </blockquote> <p>Howe's most distinctive characteristic is her "intense stations of belief," and her abiding sense of the spiritual—or what she calls "bewilderment." In her essay "Bewilderment," from <i>The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life</i> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) Howe writes, "One definition of the lyric might be that it is a method of searching for something that can't be found. It is an air that blows and buoys and settles. It says, "Not this, not this," instead of, "I have it." In the new serial poem "Medjugorje," she writes: </p> <blockquote> <p>I wish I was Jesus <br>with baby Mary <br>a gold string theory <br>built out of twos! <p>I wish I was that yellow <br>strand that dribbled <br>like spittle <br>into the people's eyes <p> because it was a person <br>without a name <br>and God roared down <br><i>This is the second and last time!</i> <br> </blockquote> <p>Formally, Howe's main mode is the serial poem—(individual sections which form a larger associative aggregate poem). Again, in her essay "Bewilderment," Howe writes "To me, the serial poem is a spiral poem." She adds: </p> <blockquote> <p> In this poetry circling can take form as sublimations, inversion, echolalia, digression, glossolalia, and rhymes. <br> </blockquote> <p>The central question running throughout her writing, and continuing in the new collection, may be—how does art take place in a life? In the life of a woman and artist; in a life associated with childhood, children, and (the lowly station of) being a child; in a life that is seemingly or literally imprisoned, exiled, or erased. In her new serial poem "Forged," she writes: </p> <blockquote> <p>Did I believe or was it hope <br>Like a fir tree in a children's nursery <br>candlelights on thistleballs <br>at a village called Manningtree <p>Funny how children continue to call Mummy <br>to a woman and her law at a table <br>that she may turn all words back into the prayers <br> that they once were <br> </blockquote> <p>Settings for her work often include Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, and the geographic home for her magnificent series of poems <i>O'Clock </i> (1995), whose subject is, in part, the spirit articulated in her blunt lyricism. In the new collection the engaging serial poem "Kneeling Bus," is another noteworthy example of Howe's privately cultivated theology. She writes:</p> <blockquote> <p>I'll defy emptiness <br>instead of dying <p>I'll follow Jesus onto the M11 <br>with my sack of apples <p>and smile like the nanny <br>at 67<sup>th</sup> and Columbus <p>in fake fur and dark glasses, <br>a child's hand in hers. <br> </blockquote> <p>Throughout Howe's work the act of asking questions plays a sustaining role. For Howe, questions go to the heart of a poetics defined by a state of bewilderment. Howe writes, "The human heart…in a state of bewilderment, doesn't want to answer questions as much as to lengthen the resonance of those questions." Again in a later section of "Kneeling Bus," Howe emphatically writes: </p> <blockquote> <p>All this has to happen to everyone without exception. <br>Now answer these questions: <p>Why is the messiah dumped in a pit? <br>Why is the messiah scorned and laughed at? <br>Why does the messiah wear his heart <br>on his chest and then point at it? <p>No answer. That's why. <br> </blockquote> <p>Despite her commitment to social justice Howe's writing does not directly aspire to transform human nature to conform to a more ideal system. Confronted with perplexing realities, Howe does not seek to extinguish them, but instead embraces bewilderment. In the new poem "9/11" she writes: </p> <blockquote> <p>Like winners taking the hit <br>Like looking down on Utah as if <p>It was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan <br>Like war-planes out of Miramar <p>Like a split cult a jolt of coke New York <br>Like Mexico in its deep beige couplets <p>Like this, like that ... like Call us all It <br>Thou It. "Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!"</p> <br> </blockquote> <p>The result is that while Howe acknowledges bewilderment as an inescapable quality of life, she necessarily endorses it throughout her writing as an act of artistic, political, and spiritual agency, which may be the central achievement of her most affecting work. <br></p> </table> </body>