The newest collection from “one of America’s most dazzling poets” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
Love and I
Poems
- “[Love and I] hurries to join a long and illustrious career, which, besides poetry, includes novels, stories, memoir, and short films. . . . Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her poems await illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life.” —The New Yorker
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
Praise
- “Love and I is a meander through a singular mind. . . . Howe’s inquisitiveness, generosity, and care are easy to appreciate and impossible to resist.”—Zyzzyva
- “In nearly every poem, the poet delves deeply. Her questing invites us to read and reread. For all academic and larger public library collections.”—Library Journal
- “Readers ready to suspend expectations about what and how poems mean will delight in the transformations happening in these pages.”—Publishers Weekly
- “[Love and I is] Howe at her fierce best; and in the reading, you may be dazzled, like the first time you found poetry.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
