Susan Howe, Penitential Cries

 

To Whom It May Concern, It’s time for an update. Insertion of needle into vein for collection of blood sample deeper than ruins are

I’ve been lucky I say to the indifferent universe

“There is a great river this side of Stygia”

Geriatric tachycardia murmurs pounding or fluttering even chaotic; an echocardiogram can only tell so far

7:15 am. It’s hard to make out the numbers on my watch because it’s an ordinary Timex with a small face under glass and a narrow leather strap made to fit around a widow pariah’s thin arm while the Connecticut River flows to a cosmic unknown place where the “elderly” get lost. “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” Wallace Steven’s great poem, is a poem of resignation. “The river is fateful, // Like the last one. But there is no ferryman, // He could not bend against its propelling force.”

There’s long been a deep precision cut with the metaphysical through the works of American poet Susan Howe, including in her latest offering, Penitential Cries (New York NY: New Directions, 2025), offering prose stretches that seem to break apart even as they interconnect. Her poems have long held that particular tension: between breaking into component parts and small piles while simultaneously held together through sheer, impossible coherence. How does, one might ask, the centre actually hold? I’ve been reading her work for years now without fully able to articulate what it is that strikes me so deeply, while also finding it incredibly generative, a series of works one needs to sit in for some time, to allow into and underneath the skin. I still recommend her collection That This (New Directions, 2010), a book that included the death of her husband [see my review of such here], to anyone who has experienced a recent loss, finding the collection enormously helpful after the death of my mother, allowing or even providing a permission to attempt my own examinations. Through Howe, connections of sound, meaning and form interact and interconnect underneath each book’s umbrella, whether that be through a particular subject matter through idea, or a phrase, watching the whole of her life and thinking and research and immediacy fall into how her inquiries take shape.

Morning. Early light where have they lain him? Mary come running the door is open the Lord is gone. We don’t want to say goodbye even if we have to leave the “present” present with other groups of retirees, pariahs, and ancestral stutterers. It is up to us even if we are dead even if there is nothing in the tomb. I know this, but someone is waiting at the top of the steep hill covered in sand we must climb to reach the lost family fable. It’s easy, no pain in the knees, no balance, canes thrown away—when we finally arrive there is Lady Honoria Dedlock seated at her deck to Chesney Wold reading old love letters, even older than the ones our mother kept in a cardboard box beside the washing machine in the cellar. Children can see a thousand miles off

Heart pictograph little frills.

As the back cover of this new title offers, Howe is the author of numerous collections, including more than a dozen through New Directions, including: My Emily Dickinson (1985; reissued 2007), The Europe of Trusts (1990), The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), Pierce-Arrow (1999), The Midnight (2003), Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) [see my review of such here], That This (2010), Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013) [see my review of such here], Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (co-published with Christine Burgin Books, 2014) [see my review of such here], The Quarry: Essays (2015), Debths (2017) and Concordance (2020). Over the years, her lyric collage has expanded across multiple structural points or perspectives within each collection: a prose section, a visual/collage poem sequence section, and, in this particular collection, a (relatively) more straightforward poem, each of which offer her usual density, collage and clipped language. Sometimes a line or sentence is cut off or without period, even in prose, allowing that line or phrase to hang in the air, having already provided its point, not requiring ending or punctuation; either way, we know the thought will continue, further down the line, down the page, through the collection or the one or ones that might follow. However thorough, complete or self-contained, is any thought or idea finished? Other times, the poem-collage of her phrases and fragments overlay to a point of unreadability, showcasing a sense of visual cluster; providing, in its own way, tone and a clipped, blended and collaged information all at once.

Through the four sections of Penitential Cries—from the opening, title prose sequence, the visual collage sequence of “Sterling Park in the Dark,” the shorter prose sequence “The Deserted Shelf” and closing, clipped lyric density of the poem “Chipping Sparrow”—one might feel that this is Susan Howe (born in 1937, for point of reference) feeling her age. She writes of, or quickly references, medical appointments and widowhood, managing a freshness across a lyric prose and stitched collage that manages such remarkable depths, while simultaneously suggesting a skimming across the archive, literary references and deep reading, across personal details and observations, across the boundaries of time and the distances of human limitation.

I woke up this morning half out of a dream and thought Widows and Pariahs was a good title—for to be one or both is to be anonymous in soft rain on a quiet street waiting quietly alone. We feel even more alone Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, in suburb twilight there is happiness in listening before leaving the simplicity of life, no matter what supernatural messages are nesting in physical therapy and distinguishing marks. Frailty means nothing Night of my soul, not yet forced to go paperless, branches and brilliance, willing to run the risk of whistling dust beside lists of other authors and what admiration and affection means disclosed to a worldwide interpreter who whispers low in each baby’s ear no one knows what chrism in cradle. Little wandering sonic Juvenilia formed to body likeness you seek nothing but authentic substance, still depths of the mighty forest. Thank you love of the sea under whose breaking waves

Enjambment tipped in with wings extended

before forgetting the intellectual part not even two syllables not the least sting in the arm—sometimes even exultation

Hello Usurper