The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Fanny Howe’s ostensible concern in The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation is the origin and nature of her writing life. Poet, novelist, and essayist of distinction, Howe also engages her familiar themes of mysticism, art making, and social justice, as well as her familiar backdrops of Boston and Ireland, with her signature catholicity.

In the two anchoring essays of the collection, which is Howe’s second work of lyrical nonfiction, she explores the origins of her work through bits of straight autobiography (childhood and adolescence in “Branches,” adolescence and adulthood in “Person, Place, Time”) interwoven with meditations on the works and (often famous) friendships that have influenced her. These two lengthy essays are refreshingly offset by several brief pieces, including the terse, brilliant “America,” a meditation on social injustice and spirituality (two pages); the glitteringly weird “The Land of Dreams,” a meditation on Jesus (one-and-a-half pages); and the gorgeous “Evocation,” a tiny slice of memoir made more sensuous by its subtle, tannic bite (four pages).

A mid-length essay, "Waters Wide," brings us from narrative of Howe's history into her present tense and recent past, moving with an easy clarity through meditations on the natures of time and language, writing as work as prayer, and qualities of transreligeous experience. There is an intimacy in this piece that is often lacking in "Branches" and "Person, Place, Time" which have their strengths in reading as cultural and political histories as well as personal ones.

Throughout The Winter Sun, Howe employs a prose form that has drawn accurate comparisons to collage. While these essays are rich in content, readers new to Howe may find her idiom taxing in the collection’s two longest pieces, where her narrative can become so broadly associative as to suggest evasion. Fortunately, neophytes to Howe have her extensive canon from which to draw if __The Winter Sun_ proves a mixed first meeting, while veteran converts will likely find it a fluid addition to her body of work.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, May 20th 2009

The Lyrics

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:45:00 +0000

By Fanny Howe

Graywolf Press

Fanny Howe’s poetry collection, The Lyrics, includes poems that thrive on the lyric poem’s conventions; the poems include both the personal world of the speaker, as well as the universal world. Each poem is also a lyric by itself; each lyric comprises The Lyrics spoken about in the title. It is not uncommon for Howe to include first person plurals; the result is a collection that addresses the emotional journey of not just its speakers, but the people around the speakers.

If ever there was a poem serving as an atlas or guide for this collection’s reader, it is the poem “28.” from the first section of the book, “The Days.” This poem represents the journey that the reader, speaker(s) and poet are taking. Howe writes:

*A day is a freely given poem; it can be short or long. Contradiction, coincidence.

An emotional experience. Perseverance through hell.

A series of events you must not forget. Twelve sunsets, twenty nine dawns, all in one.

An epiphany. How long your hopes last

Until the next poem.*

This poem explains both the terrain of the poem’s conception and focus, as well as the terrain of human experience. The poems in this collection deal with “contradiction” and “coincidence” and how each “epiphany” leads to another “series of events.” The poems are short, but together they make one large poem. These “lyrics” are subtitled with numbers, as each forms the bulk of a larger poem. As the aforementioned poem is contained under “The Days,” it is both its own poem, as well as a piece of a larger poem. The lyrical poem’s “emotional experience” is what drives the collection’s pieces, but, oftentimes, the poems circle around subject matter just as humans see the world.

Gender has a prominent place in Howe’s book. If this collection is about the journeys we take and the accompanying emotions, then gender is a logical issue to include; afterall, Howe is not only a poet, but also a female poet. In poems such as “5.” - in the section titled, “Home” - power and equality are spoken about in the situation Howe presents. She writes about “the long pause” when “men and women/struggle with equal strength” and how, eventually, the man will “drag me through the streets” and how he “dropped me and the children at a station/Like statues he had cut, baked and broken.” Here, gender is spoken about explicitly. The male figure uses and abuses, and the female speaks as if beyond the grave of how “I must have been insane.” Here, Howe demonstrates the ways in which men and women have interacted, and how violent a traditional space, such as “home,” can be.

Patriarchal culture is also discussed in terms of war. In her poem, “6.” - in the section titled “School” - she writes how “humans and horses together” are “one thing.” Here, the culture is brought to an animalistic level; horses and humans, “pricks/in their pants…/draw up plans/for the continuing slaughter.” Here, the patriarchial violence is highlighted to draw attention to the culture’s violence. For this poem to exist in the "School" section insinuates the way in which violence and patriarchal culture are things that are learned.

The poems in Howe’s collection explore the world in which people live and the elements that affect each collective and individual experience. The poems contain inversions, repetition and an elliptical take on subjects such as religion, education, nature and gender. The world is broken into pieces, but the whole is created through each “lyric.”

Written by: Lisa Bower, July 19th 2007