The Midnight [Paperback]

InNew poetry and prose from a most acclaimed experimental American poet. The germ of this extraordinary book is an elegy for the poet's mother, the Irish actress and playwright Mary Manning. But in For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power. Monomania has its rewards.... The verse has an incantatory power, that shines through.... Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest.