Come and See

by Fanny Howe

Overview

"We cannot do without Fanny Howe." —Ange Mlinko, The Nation


Here a gun might go off,
There perhaps a broom would brush away the sticks of spring.
It was not your fault where you were dropped
Or where you took your first steps.
—from "After Watching Klimov's Agoniya"

In Fanny Howe's latest collection of poems, she beckons us toward the origins of both our collective knowing and our misperception. These poems move from one country to another and from one archetypal position—parent, grandparent, child—to another in the wake of the twentieth century. Certain movies provide an almost religious resolution to questions and experiences. "I don't blame the children for anything," Howe writes in one poem. "Their century is like a director who prefers his script to his actors." With startling revelation and lyrical power, Come and See urges us to observe the world anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975869
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/24/2011
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, essays, and fiction, including The Lyrics and The Winter Sun. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

Fanny Howe is a religious writer whose work makes you more alert and alive to the earth, an experimental writer who can break your heart.” —CHRISTIAN WIMAN

From the Publisher

Now a second snow/ is falling on the first.// In a land of troubles/ every snowfall is the same." The author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Howe explores the cultural uncertainty inherent in uncertain times through poems that often reflect on art, film, and drama. She includes meditations on Elem Klimov's Agoniya and Larissa Shepitko's The Ascent, both Soviet films, and on an essay written by Polish Jewish author Ilona Karmel, a Holocaust survivor: "Ideally poetry reveals the face of justice through syntax, balance, image. That is, the harmony strung between two disparate images." These are poems of multiple selves and multiple eras, of oppression and the search for justice, of time's fleeting and relentless passage and the inevitability of both. Sometimes stylized poetically and sometimes arranged in more proselike paragraphs, Howe's lines reflect her meditative stance, asking questions, probing for answers, searching for truths. And yet: "You can never/ persuade one person that another/ is a liar. People prefer the liar." VERDICT Recommended for all readers of contemporary poetry.—Karla Huston, Wisconsin Acad. of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Madison

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