Mark Scroggins Close Reads Susan Howe's Latest Collection

Susan Howe's latest collection, Concordance (New Directions), contains "many wonders," writes Mark Scroggins at Hyperallergic. One "is the pitch to which Howe has brought her own marriage of words and shapes, even as she continues to demonstrate her sense of the complex interconnections of memory, history, and culture, and her mastery of the traditionally lyrical." More: 

It’s no surprise that Howe began her career as a visual artist. From her earliest published writing, inspired as much by the canvases of Ad Reinhardt as by the “composition by field” poetics of Charles Olson, she’s considered the poem first and foremost as an arrangement of black words on a white page. In earlier books, Howe collaged and criss-crossed lines at angles, overlaying text blocks into page arrangements that sometimes resembled Cubist collages. Recently, she has scaled back her explosive surfaces into more compact, discrete bundles of print, scissored out of photocopied source texts and painstakingly assembled into resonant nuggets that seem to float at the center of each page.

A sequence of these “rotating prisms” (Howe’s phrase) makes up “Concordance,” the central long poem of Concordance’s three sections. Howe’s source texts are sometimes recognizable even in their fragmentation: concordances of canonical poets; annotated and facsimile editions of their works; and various field guides to regional flora, fauna, and minerals.

Continue at Hyperallergic.