A MEMOIR FROM POET FANNY HOWE, WHO HAS BEEN PRAISED FOR HER “PRIVATE QUEST THROUGH THE METAPHYSICAL UNIVERSE…THE RESULTS ARE STARTLING AND HONEST” (THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
One of America’s most original contemporary poets reflects on childhood language and meaning in her richly contemplative memoir
Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, she shows the origins and requirements of “a vocation that has no name.” She finds proof of this in the lives of others—Jacques Lusseyran who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II; the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abbé Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them; and the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Bronte. With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a “progress” rather than a memoir.
The Winter Sun displays the same power as in Howe’s highly praised collection of essays,
The Wedding Dress, a book described by James Carroll as an “unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman’s life, and, always, the redemption of literature.”
“Howe’s “Notes on a Vocation” clarifies the role of the poet in an age of widespread scientism that peremptorily decides what questions are worth asking and how best to answer them.”
—THE NATION
“Fanny Howe is a true visionary who asks the right questions. As these awful times bear themselves out politically, we come to need her exemplary art all the more; she has been a faithful and unflinching voice through all these years of unholy turmoil. Her meditative new book,
The Winter Sun, is a brave and original work.”
—PETER GIZZI
