Trappings: New Poems - Softcover

Howard, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885983433 ISBN 13: 9781885983435

Publisher: Turtle Point Press, 2000

Synopsis

"Trappings reminds us how, for decades, Howard's is the gold standard for those who care about the shape sound and wit of a poem."—Boston Review

About this title

Review

Richard Howard has always been a poet of marvelous and multiple personae. In the course of 10 volumes of verse he has spoken in the voices of John Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Robert Browning--not to mention the less cultivated, more homicidal narrator of "At Bluebeard's Castle." In Trappings, he continues in this vein of poetic ventriloquism. "Family Values," for example, finds the blind Milton dictating to his daughters, who grow quite vocal in return. Here is Anne, protesting her duties as a recording angel:

It is always I who must relieve
my sister where she stands, taking the words
from him, terrible words out of the air
as they come, unceasing, to us. I sit,
sewing the while, until our Deborah
fails, and when the silence falls, I begin.

The playful convolutions of speech, the faint inflections of character--these are Richard Howard's stock-in-trade. Yet the most effective pieces in Trappings are those in which the poet speaks for (more or less) himself. "The Job Interview" recalls a nerve-wracking encounter with André Breton, whose Nadja the young poet hoped to translate. Given the surrealist panjandrum's "legendary loathing of queers," Howard kept his sexual preferences strictly under wraps. Forty years later, his translation "is still in print, and people still hate queers. / I allay that heart of mine with the words / Breton wrote to Simone, first of his wives / (and a Jew like me): / criticism will be love, or will not be." This is about as close as Howard, a formalist to his fingertips, will ever get to the confessional mode. But the simplified syntax and first-person directness suit him well--and while he'll always remain an essentially dramatic poet, it's a pleasure to see Richard Howard go head-to-head with (as he writes in "At 65") that "garrulous presence / we sometimes call the self." --James Marcus

About the Author

Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, translator, and critic. He is the author of more than a dozen books including most recently Paper Trail, Selected Prose 1965-2003 (FSG, 2004) and Inner Voices, Selected Poetry, 1963-2003(FSG,2004). He has won the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, The Lambda Book Award, and The Robert Frost Medal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Turtle Point Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1885983433
• ISBN 13: 9781885983435
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 81