Full Description
What the Earth Seemed to Say is a powerful collection of more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America's most daring and courageous poets.
With its 'radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions' (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe's poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of her four previous collections - including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss - and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is 'a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy' (Dorianne Laux).
Contents
New Poems (2023)
13 Prologue
15 Postscript
16 Practicing
18 The Saw, The Drill
19 Reincarnation
21 Another Theory of Time
22 Persephone
23 Persephone, in the meadow
24 Persephone and Demeter
25 Advent
26 What the Earth Seemed to Say, 2020
28 The Letter, 1968
29 The Forest
30 The Maples
31 Jack and the Moon
32 Before
33 Seventy
34 The Willows
35 Hymn
37 The Singularity
from The Good Thief (1987)
41 Part of Eve's Discussion
42 Death, the Last Visit
43 What the Angels Left
45 The Meadow
47 The Split
50 What Belongs to Us
52 Gretel, from a sudden clearing
55 Keeping Still
56 Without Devotion
58 Sorrow
59 Mary's Argument
60 Encounter
from What the Living Do (1997)
65 The Boy
66 Sixth Grade
68 Buying the Baby
70 Practicing
71 The Attic
73 The Copper Beech
74 The Game
76 The Girl
77 The Dream
78 For Three Days
80 Just Now
81 A Certain Light
83 How Some of It Happened
85 The Last Time
86 The Promise
87 The Cold Outside
88 The Grave
90 The Gate
91 One of the Last Days
92 Late Morning
93 Watching Television
95 Separation
96 Prayer
98 Reunion
99 The Kiss
101 My Dead Friends
102 What the Living Do
104 Buddy
from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008)
107 The Star Market
108 Reading Ovid
110 After the Movie
112 Limbo
113 Easter
114 Marriage
115 Prayer
116 Courage
117 Why the Novel Is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read
119 Government
120 Poems from The Life of Mary
120 Sometimes the moon
121 Once or twice or three times
122 How you can't move moonlight
123 You think this happened only once?
124 Annunciation
125 My Mother's Body
126 Before the Fire
127 Fifty
128 Hurry
129 The Spell
131 The Snow Storm
132 Mary (Reprise)
from Magdalene (2017)
135 Before the Beginning
136 Magdalene—The Seven Devils
139 On Men, Their Bodies
140 How the Story Started
141 Thorns
142 The Affliction
144 Magdalene: The Addict
145 The Landing
146 The Teacher
147 The Disciples
148 Magdalene on Gethsemane
149 Calvary
150 Low Tide, Late August
151 The Adoption: When the Girl Arrived
152 Conversation: Dualism
153 The News
155 Walking Home
156 The Map
157 Waiting at the River
158 Christmas Eve
159 Two Animals
160 The Teacher
161 Fourteen
162 Adaptation
164 October
165 Delivery
166 Magdalene at the Theopoetics Conference
167 One Day
168 Magdalene Afterwards
171 Acknowledgements
172 Index of Titles and First Lines
