The Quarry: Essays [Paperback]

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new Vagrancy in the Park (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as The Disappearance Approach, Personal Narrative, Sorting Facts, Frame Structures, and Where Should the Commander Be, and ending with her seminal early criticism, The End of Art. The essays of?Reaching back through Hawthorne, Dickinson and beyond, Susan Howe taps a stream of American thinking that is as as clear and fresh as a draught of well water. She is our conscience, our voice, our song.No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention.Universally recognized as a major poet, Susan Howe should also be known as the most innovative, the most thrilling essayist writing today.Marvelous with a visionary apprehension of what is to come, telepathic communication with past poetries, histories, lives, material and spiritual realities.Howe's brilliant, idiosyncratic essay islike much of her worka combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks.She manages to balance the most cerebral passages with a sharp eye for just the right detail...Howe is not for casual readers, but serious ones will be amply rewarded.For fans of Howe's poetry and readers fascinated by artistic process.Howe's words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another roomexcept that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable.The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement.Monomania has its rewardsan incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Blă!