That This

by Susan Howe, James Welling (Photographer)

Overview

Susan Howe’s newest book of poetry is a revelation as well as a mystery.

"What treasures of knowledge we cluster around." That This is a collection in three pieces. "Disappearance Approach," an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death—"land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth"—begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. "Frolic Architecture," the second section—inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling—presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, "invisible" Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, "That This," delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:

     That this book is a history of
     a shadow that is a shadow of


     Me mystically one in another
     another another to subserve.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811223775
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/25/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.
James Welling, b. 1951, is an acclaimed experimental artist who employs a wide variety of photographic tools and media.

Editorial Reviews

In this very beautiful four-part book, Howe (Souls of the Labadie Tract) seeks to come to terms with the sudden death of her third husband, the philosopher and scholar Peter H. Hare. The four sections take radically different formal "approaches" to his loss, in the sense of going backwards in time, to the days just before Hare's fatal embolism, and in the sense of finding a means of understanding, or at least of moving forward. The first section uses a simple, diaristic prose through which Howe incorporates the terse capitals of Hare's autopsy, along with a variety of 18th-century epistolary condolences. The result conveys Howe's sense of "being present at a point of absence where crossing centuries may prove to be like crossing languages." The next section, "Frolic Architecture," comprises densely layered photocopied text fragments whose three-dimensional quality seems to extend into a fourth—time. The title section follows with seven pages of strophic, hymnlike verse, where "Grass angels perish in this// harmonic collision because/ non-being cannot be ‘this.'" By the final, untitled collage, Howe has made her grief speak as much through textual interstices and shifts in diction and form as through each singular elegy. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality."

Artforum

"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."

The Boston Review - John Palattella

Death is one of the preeminent subjects of poetry, and Howe (A Europe of Trusts) approaches this topic with the gravitas of one who has endured loss. Her newest volume deals chiefly with the death of her husband, Peter Hare. The book juxtaposes Howe's personal recollections with excerpts from an assortment of documents, ranging from 18th-century diaries to an array of half-decayed ephemera, such as bits of Poussin prints and fragments of linguistic sculpture. Most interesting is the way in which Howe historicizes her husband as a strategy for compartmentalizing the often-painful memory of him. In short, Howe makes him part of her inner life by transforming him into text. Thus changed, Hare now becomes a different kind of presence—one whose status is illustrated by the book's title, as it reminds us of the disparity between that which is here (This) and that which is elsewhere (That). VERDICT An intelligent and unorthodox treatment of grief, this title will appeal to poetry and visual arts enthusiasts.—Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO

Library Journal