Yesterday, I couldn’t find Fanny Howe’s book in the micro.blog library, but I found this review while creating a link to it and meant to include it.
From the start of its beginning section, first published in a now out-of-print edition from 1987, the best describer I can muster is movement. The poem, I’ll call it that, picks up and carries forth with the decisive power of thought. The intelligence and brilliance of its author builds paragraph by paragraph in evocative descriptions and lines that punch a cerebral TKO. The mind is only half of the trip, though, as it is spirit that animates the story: a struggle, a quest, to understand and embrace the unknowable. Such musings find me with not only the expected sense of awe that comes with the divine, but provide a tonic to the selfishly depressive state that I often dwell. For me, it is this reaching past the comfort and security of facts to the uncertainty and wisdom of not knowing that is one of the myriad things that makes life worth living.
I would only clarify that, if movement is even the right word for it, it’s a very circular movement that adds a unique (but still dream-like) texture along the way.
Howe is certainly over my head, but still worth an afternoon.
