Souls of the Labadie Tract

by Susan Howe

Overview

Souls of the Labadie Tract finds Susan Howe exploring (or unsettling) one of her favorite domains, the psychic past of America. This time the presiding tutelary geniuses are Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens.

Souls of the Labadie Tract finds Susan Howe exploring (or unsettling) one of her favorite domains, the psychic past of America, with Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens as her presiding tutelary geniuses. Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland, in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls, Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and scraps of material. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress that ends the book. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction:

     There it is there it is—you
     want the great wicked city
     Oh I wouldn't I wouldn't

     It's not only that you're not
     It's what wills and will not.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811217187
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/17/2007
Series:	New Directions Paperbook Series
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention."

Marjorie Perloff

"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

"Howe's words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another room—except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable."

The Village Voice - Geoffrey O'Brien

Over the past three decades Howe has worked as a kind of poet-scholar manqué, mixing into her books prose explorations of early American spiritual and historical chroniclers and her own distinctive poems, usually terse, four-stress snippets that themselves seem like fugitive fragments from a larger suppressed text. In her newest book, Howe stands in thrall to a 17th-century history of Deerfield, Mass., and then chases down an obscure reference to "Labadist" in Wallace Stevens's family tree, which brings her to the story of a short-lived Utopian "quietest sect," followers of Jean de Labadie who established a community in Maryland in 1684 that vanished within 40 years. It is in these vast tracts of time made intimate by texts, by language, that Howe operates: "I keep you here to keep/ your promise all that you/ think I've wrought what// I see or do in the twilight/ of time but keep forgetting/ you keep coming back." Beginning with a quote from Jonathan Edwards equating the silkworm to "a type of Christ" and ending with a photograph of a fragment of the silk wedding dress of Edwards's wife, onto which Howe projects a text ("I have already shown that space is God"), this is intense stuff. Published simultaneously with a new edition (prefaced by Eliot Weinberger) of Howe's classic critical work My Emily Dickinson. (Nov.)

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