Susan Howe's Debths Reviewed at Hyperallergic

At Hyperallergic, Douglas Messerli nods to Susan Howe's latest and rumored to be her last (though we certainly hope not) collection of poetry, Debths. The collection's title is culled from the pages of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Messerli explains: "The word, like many of those which Howe has used throughout her long and productive career as a poet and artist, is a combine that suggests to the poetic ear several words simultaneously: depths, debts, and death in the toiling moil, the deep turmoil of which Joyce writes." From there: 

In her eloquent “Foreword” to this work, the poet hints at some of these overlaying depths and debts, including her childhood experiences at the Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls, where she was marooned by her parents and took part in campfire stories and private readings.

Howe, always the experimental Brahmin, creates a poetic space in which figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville rub shoulders with Henry James and the lesser-known William Austin. The English fairy tale, Tom Tit Tot is interlaid within collages with Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Coleridge’s Collected Letters, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Spinoza’s Ethics. In Debths, Bing Crosby sings to Titian. The author’s Irish heritage and early exposure to writing and theater (her mother, Mary Manning, was a playwright, novelist and critic, who helped to found Poets’ Theater later in Cambridge) and her Cambridge, Massachusetts, upbringing (her father Mark DeWolfe Howe was a noted professor in the Harvard Law School who wrote on Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), further contextualize these works.

Read more at Hyperallergic.