The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority [Hardcover]

The Poetry of Susan Howe provides a comprehensive survey of the major works of one of America's foremost contemporary poets. The book describes the relationship between poetic form and the various configurations of history, religious thought, and authority in Howe's writing. Will Montgomery argues that her highly opaque texts reflect the resistance that the past offers to contemporary investigation. Addressing lyric, literary history, collage and visual poetics, The Poetry of Susan Howe is a lucid and persuasive investigation of the volatile movements of this extraordinary body of work.Introduction The Maternal Disinheritance The Ghost of the Father Susan Howe's Renaissance The Poetics of American Space Enthusiasm, Telepathy, and Immediacy The Late Lyric

Montgomery provides a comprehensive survey of Howe's poetry, one that makes use of the poet's correspondence, journals, and working notes. - Choice

In The Poetry of Susan Howe, it is evident that Montgomery has done an amazing amount of research regarding Howe s career and writings; the pages are peppered with numerous quotations from her writing and from interviews with her. His analysis is also exceptional, making this a book full of insight into a 'difficult' poet. - Rain Taxi Review of Books

Most readings of Susan Howe s poetry to date have been insider views:they account for Howe s themes, images, and structures by lining these up with her own stated views and purposes. Will Montgomery s may thus be the first to read Howe s oeuvre critically, to examine what he sees as the unresolved but productive tension in Howe s work between a poetry of redress and a poetry of grace. To call Howe s writing (whether poetry or prose ) anti-authoritarian or anti-canonical, for example, is to downplay its complexity and contradiction: hers is an oeuvre that returns poetic language back to a founding and incoercible strangeness. Refusing to classify this dazzling and indispensablelÃp