On the Ground: Poems - Softcover

Howe, Fanny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974031 ISBN 13: 9781555974039

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2004

Synopsis

A spiritually resonant and politically urgent new collection by the winner of the Lenore Marshall poetry prize

My father was a soldier
who was smaller than my son

when he returned as a ghost.

I begged him to stay with us
but he said: "Not until you come to life."
-from "[Untitled]"

Fanny Howe's bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived "on the ground." While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?

About this title

About the Author

Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Gone, Selected Poems, One Crossed Out, and a collection of essays, The Wedding Dress.
She lives in New England.

Reviews

Simultaneously tender, political, lyrical and global in scope, this set of short sequences from Howe (One Crossed Out) has at its core the belief that love plays a redemptive role at all scales of interaction, giving intense force to grapplings with intimacy: "I think proximity is the abyss/ between God and us because// every fabric of my body is trying/ to know why saying// I love you / in a time of extremity is a necessity." Howe buttresses details drawn from individual lives with explorations of good and evil not as justifications for action, but as things to know and act from: "I am no one./ I know hell and have hope." Though elsewhere Howe has reinvented Catholic imagery fascinatingly, her direct engagements of it here can be flat: "Satan announces himself without sense/ I am pro-life, I kill from a distance." "The Dragon of History" is similarly brittle, as are some of the explicit references to September 11, the Iraq War and the second intifada. But such facts on the ground carry an anger that in turn carries these poems throughout—"Not even a postage stamp/ and not the spit for it"—revealing connections between small and large, here and elsewhere, where "Time covered sky/ over multiple eyes."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974031
• ISBN 13: 9781555974039
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72