Fanny Howe – författare

The new poetry collection by Fanny Howe, whose "body of work seems larger, stranger, and more permanent with each new book she publishes" (Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize citation)People want to be poets for reasons that have little to do with language.It''s the life of the poet that they want.Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.Some people''s lives are more poetic than a poem,and Francis is certainly one of these.I know, because he walked beside me for that short timewhether you believe it or not. —from "Outremer"Fanny Howe''s poetry is known for its lyricism, fragmentation, experimentation, religious engagement, and commitment to social justice. In Second Childhood, the observing poet is an impersonal figure who accompanies Howe in her encounters with chance and mystery. She is not one age or the other, in one time or another. She writes, "The first question in the Catechism is: / What was humanity born for? / To be happy is the correct answer."

A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America''s most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)Fanny Howe''s The Needle''s Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge "from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." As the philosopher Richard Kearney writes, "Howe''s ruminations and aesthetics are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats." The Needle''s Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, "recognized as one of the country''s least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers" (The Boston Globe).

The newest collection from “one of America’s most dazzling poets” (O, The Oprah Magazine)Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of “pure seeing” and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe''s philosophy of Bewilderment.