The newest collection from “one of America’s most dazzling poets” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
Love and I
Poems
Some who lack love keep traveling.
They sense that an airplane is a mystical vessel
That flies because it doesn’t know it’s on air.
They say goodbye to life and earth when boarding.
Strapped down
They must go on living because they have scores to settle.
And suddenly they want to talk to God.
—from Love and I
They sense that an airplane is a mystical vessel
That flies because it doesn’t know it’s on air.
They say goodbye to life and earth when boarding.
Strapped down
They must go on living because they have scores to settle.
And suddenly they want to talk to God.
—from Love and I
Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of “pure seeing” and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts, and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.
Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.
Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.
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About the Author
Credit: Lynn Christoffers
Upcoming Events
Graywolf at 45: Poetry reading co-sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library
Date:
Location:
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DCview map
A poetry reading featuring Fanny Howe (Love and I), Ilya Kaminsky (Deaf Republic), and Danez Smith (Don't Call Us Dead). Co-sponsored by and hosted at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Single tickets are $15.
