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Souls of the Labadie Tract
by
Susan Howe (Goodreads Author)
Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and material scraps. Souls of the Labadie T...more
Paperback, 127 pages
Published
November 17th 2007
by New Directions
(first published November 15th 2007)
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A beautiful book. Howe's relation to the past gets richer and richer. Here I especially love the title sequence, where a "you" gradually accumulates, addressed by ghosts from lost history... and the final sequence, "A Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards," with its final narrowing slit or eye, as if time is again receding, closing up... the profoundly moving sense, in this very visual work, of a time that time itself passes through, or the movements of a contemporary reader's...more
It is wrong to write a review of her book on hand but if I don't do it while procrastinating at work I wont do it. This is I think as good a place to start with Howe's later work as any. Her work has always been intertextual but after Europe of Trusts her sources become more remote and access to her work across increasingly slender bridges. And as much as I like THE IDEA of an entire book on bedhangings, I think I first need someone to convince me how a book on bed hangings fits--nay hinges!--in...more
'America in a skin coat
the color of the juice of
mulberries' her fantastic
cap full of eyes will lead
our way as mind or ears
Goodnight goodnight
"The future seemed to lie in this forest of theories, letters, and forgotten actualities.
I felt a harmony beyond the confinement of our being merely dross or tin"
the color of the juice of
mulberries' her fantastic
cap full of eyes will lead
our way as mind or ears
Goodnight goodnight
"The future seemed to lie in this forest of theories, letters, and forgotten actualities.
I felt a harmony beyond the confinement of our being merely dross or tin"
Excellent: a little difficult for me & took (as all her works do, but this especially) a number of readings to begin to grasp. Well worth the time.
Ellie NYC
Ellie NYC
Susan Howe is my poetry godmother.
Aug 14, 2008
Jocelyn
added it
"Armed with call numbers, I find my way among scriptural exegeses, ethical homiletics, antiquarian researches, tropes and allegories, totemic animal parents, prophets, and poets. My retrospective excursions follow the principle that ghosts wrapped in appreciative obituaries by committee members, or dedications presented at vanished community field meetings, can be reanimated by appropriation."
a fog of words in which one sees pieces of the past which are then swallowed up by the present and the process of considering them. and i'm learning to appreciate collage pieces--tho i would love to see the actual pieces of paper as opposed to the facsimile necessary for putting them in a book. poetry of thinking about thinking.
I might not have read this book at all if it weren't for Sharon (thanks, Sharon!)
It's the best book of poems I've read by SH, at least since The Europe of Trusts.
It's the best book of poems I've read by SH, at least since The Europe of Trusts.
Beautiful, haunting, haunted--this book extends Howe's previous work in exciting ways.
Dec 19, 2007
Gary
marked it as to-read
i want this
Mar 15, 2013
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Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularit...more
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“Now faith is not what we
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing
Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape”
—
2 people liked it
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing
Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape”
“God was true everything was
a mother's role in childhood
Someone was in that garden
each knowing the other to be
entirely inasmuch what each
believed or what confessed for
cordial confinement is God's
glory each seed every word”
—
2 people liked it
More quotes…
a mother's role in childhood
Someone was in that garden
each knowing the other to be
entirely inasmuch what each
believed or what confessed for
cordial confinement is God's
glory each seed every word”
