jimmylorunning's review against another edition
5.0
I am assembling materials for a recurrent return somewhere. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous. Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced. […] perhaps there is the surety that after a silence she will contact him again in bits. Escape may be through that dawning light just filtering through the blinds.
What Susan Howe does here is--on the surface--easily boiled down, shrugged off. But if I learned anything from this book, it's that surfaces matter, for it's on the surface that such messes as lives are hidden. Hidden and therefore accessible.
Mind the hidden
Being hidden is the first necessary step to being revealed. Let's ruffle then, the surfaces, the particulars that complicate and trouble our sleep so.
She has shown me that access to the metaphysical is the requirement of a N E E D. Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.
Not only does Howe have faith in a past (both personal and shared) that can be revealed through words found, words printed on a page, words written in the margin, or pictures, photographs and drawings, but also in each word itself.
Portmanteau for a voyage
For each word has a history. An etymology.
"Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind … The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought."
And in the poetic portions of this book she gives us these words as if cryptic designs etched on a curtain. It is up to us to find their histories, their linkages.
Ten thousandth truth
Ten thousandth impulse
Do not mince matter
as if tumbling were apt
parable preached in
hedge-sparrow gospel
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