Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003

by Richard Howard

Overview

The poems of Richard Howard are noted for their unique dramatic force and for preserving, in their graceful, exquisitely wrought lines, human utterance at its most urbane. Inner Voices, the first volume to draw together material from Howard's twelve books of poems, leaves no doubt as to why he has been called "a powerful presence in American poetry for 40 years" (The New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374529901
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/12/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Richard Howard teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, USA. He has also translated works by Barthes, Foucault and Todorov.

Table of Contents

	Quantities
	L'Invitation au Voyage	3
	Sandusky-New York	5
	Damages
	A Far Cry After a Close Call	11
	Seeing Cousin Phyllis Off	13
	Bonnard: A Novel	15
	The Author of Christine	18
	An Old Dancer	21
	Untitled Subjects
	1801: Among the Papers of the Envoy to Constantinople	25
	1851: A Message to Denmark Hill	28
	1881: A Beatification	33
	1889: Alassio	36
	1824-1889	42
	November, 1889	44
	1890: Further Echoes of the Late Lord Leighton	57
	1891: An Idyll	59
	1897	63
	1907: A Proposal from Paris	67
	1915: A Pre-Raphaelite Ending, London	73
	Findings
	Beyond Words	81
	From Tarragona	83
	Giovanni Da Fiesole on the Sublime, or Fra Angelico's Last Judgment	86
	From Beyoglu	88
	Two-Part Inventions
	After the Facts	95
	Infirmities [from Talking Cures]	104
	The Lesson of the Master	114
	A Natural Death	137
	Fellow Feelings
	Decades	157
	Personal Values	162
	Howard's Way	164
	The Giant on Giant-Killing	169
	Vocational Guidance	172
	Venetian Interior, 1889	176
	Purgatory, formerly Paradise	180
	Misgivings
	Thebais	187
	A Commission	191
	Homage to Nadar	194
	Charles Garnier	194
	Sarah Bernhardt	195
	Victor Hugo	197
	Honore Daumier	198
	Jacques Offenbach	200
	Gioachino Rossini	201
	Richard Wagner	203
	Charles Baudelaire	204
	Edmond and Jules de Goncourt	206
	Gustave Dore	207
	Theophile Gautier	209
	George Sand	210
	Nadar	212
	Lining Up
	Lining Up	217
	On Hearing Your Lover Is Going to the Baths Tonight	221
	Carrion (continued)	223
	At the Monument to Pierre Louys	226
	Ithaca: The Palace at Four a.m.	229
	Cygnus cygnus to Leda	232
	Telemachus	234
	Move Still, Still So	237
	No Traveller
	Even in Paris	247
	Love Which Alters	272
	Concerning K	275
	Oracles	278
	Like Most Revelations
	Occupations	303
	Poem Beginning with a Line by Isadora Duncan	313
	A Lost Art	316
	For Robert Phelps, Dead at Sixty-six	320
	Like Most Revelations	324
	Writing Off	325
	For James Boatwright, 1937-88	329
	For David Kalstone, 1932-86	332
	Homage	336
	To the Tenth Muse	338
	Trappings
	Dorothea Tanning's Cousins	345
	Nikolaus Mardruz to Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol, 1565	347
	Mrs. Eden in Town for the Day	354
	Homage to Antonio Canaletto	356
	Family Values I	360
	Family Values II	363
	Family Values III	366
	The Job Interview	369
	For Mona Van Duyn, Going On	372
	Lee Krasner: Porcelain, a Collage	375
	A Sibyl of 1979	377
	The Manatee	379
	Les Travaux d'Alexandre	381
	Among the Missing	383
	Our Spring Trip	384
	Henri Fantin-Latour: Un Coin de table, 1873	388
	At Sixty-five	390
	Talking Cures
	Close Encounters of Another Kind	395
	Knowing When to Stop	397
	Colossal	401
	Success	403
	The Masters on the Movies	405
	Now, Voyager (1942)	405
	Lost Horizon (1937)	406
	Woman of the Year (1942)	408
	King Kong (1933)	409
	Queen Christina (1933)	410
	Keeping	412
	Portrait in Pastel of the Volunteer Friedrich-August Klaatsch, 1813	414
	Hanging the Artist	417
	Elementary Principles at Seventy-two	420
	Index of Titles and First Lines	421

Editorial Reviews

A long-awaited and meticulously chosen selection of the work of one of our few poetic masters.” —John Hollander

“This volume . . . establishes [Howard] as Robert Browning's authentic heir at rendering the inner voices of the cultural past and present.” —Harold Bloom

“Inner Voices is a wonder.” —Anthony Hecht

“Howard's entire project is one of recovery, the exquisitely American need to create what Van Wyck Brooks called . . . a usable past . . . The very expanse of his sentences, their twist and torque, is an American dream of plentitude.” —James Longenbach, Boston Review

From the Publisher

By my count, 80 of the 100-odd poems in Richard Howard's ''Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003'' take art or artists as their subject. A preponderance of the 80 focus on writers and painters -- a dozen or so are ruminations on individual canvases -- but composers, sculptors and dancers also help build the throng. Such tabulations are imprecise, of course, given both the difficulties of tallying a multi-part poem and the skittery elusiveness of topic when any poem ranges far afield. What seems unarguable, however, is that in the landscape of American poetry no other poet, setting up a homestead for himself, has toiled so diligently to breed such a herd: creatures whose dam is art and whose sire is art.
— The New York Times

Brad Leithauser

Drawing on 12 previous volumes (including 1970's Pulitzer-winning Untitled Subjects), this big assortment plays to Howard's strengths-above all, to his impersonations and dramatic monologues. Howard's hyperarticulate sentences fit the preoccupations of his sophisticated personae, many of them 19th-century French and English writers and artists. John Ruskin, Henry James, the early photographer Nadar, Proust and Jane Morris (William's widow) all receive extended embodiments, as do the secretaries and intimates of other great artists. The book includes Howard's anthology hits, among them "Nicholas of Mardruz" (a biting response to Browning) and "Infirmities," in which the aged Walt Whitman critiques the closeted Bram Stoker. His elaborate forms, or "habitual/ disorders," "suffice to hold fast to the small/ change of small changes," exploring regrets or assessing the pleasures of the flesh. Howard's later volumes grew more personal (and more successful) in revealing specifically gay male experience. On the whole, these densely figured poems justify the copious ambition they embody. (Oct.) Forecast: A translator of Stendhal, Barthes, Breton and many other major French writers, the poetry editor for the Paris Review and a prolific critic, reviewer and blurber, Howard is known to several generations of intelligentsia. This, his first selected, will be the one book of his poems many will buy. FSG plans a simultaneous release for a retrospective of Howard's critical writings, Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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