Last summer at Sunstone in Salt Lake City, I had the privilege of attending a special session on poetry. One of the speakers was Susan Elizabeth Howe. She spoke about the importance of creating “tension” in poetry through the use of unusual word couplings, rare imagery, and experimentation with form.
I was not disappointed when I picked up Howe’s latest collection, Salt (Signature Books, 2013). In these poems, Howe practices what she preached at Sunstone. Each poem in this collection is a little jack-in-the-box, tightly coiled and waiting to spring.
Take for example one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Your Luck Is About to Change.” This poem I read to anyone who came within earshot during the weeks I spent enjoying this book. Speaking of surprising imagery, I love the phrase “marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan” almost as much as I love the playful menace of the last few lines describing the neighbors’ Nativity scene:
Their four-year-old has arranged
his whole legion of dinosaurs
so they, too, worship the child,
joining the cow and sheep. Or else,
flesh lovers, they’ve come to eat
ox and camel, Mary and Joseph,
then savor the newborn babe.
Howe’s poems are accessible for readers who might suffer from metrophobia (the fear or hatred of poetry; yes, it’s a real phobia!) because she writes beautifully about ordinary things. Turkeys, for example. And family trees. And, alright, petrified fetuses are not so common, but that is one of those jack-in-the-box moments readers should expect.
Simultaneously, Howe’s poetry invites multiple readings. The first poem, which is about an escaped python squeezing the breath from its owner, dissolves in the last lines to something like a stream of consciousness where eventually even punctuation drops away:
;
Will the cops get here? whose
bones, whose flesh? whose hunger
whose God whose muscle whose coils
whose will whose passion whose death?
;
I’m going to indulge myself and mention just one more moment where Howe’s poetry struck me like some wind-up hammer. In her poem “Trying on Charlotte Brontë’s Dress,” the speaker describes the supreme discomfort of wearing a corset or “laces” while pregnant:
. . . Her ribs bruised
then broke in the tightening
corset. The fetus grew. She
gasped, wheezed, sucked in
her teaspoon of breath.
I can’t even describe to you how jealous I am of that last image, “her teaspoon of breath.” I wish I’d written it.
Howe is a master of her craft. These are seasoned, carefully-crafted pieces. Do yourself a favor and get your hands on this book as soon as you possibly can. You can purchase a copy here.
Thanks for the review, and peek through the skylight of this poet’s style. Great poetry reviews give us a chance to see a few memorable examples of how an author interprets the light and shadows that comprise both the extraordinary and the mundane. (Thank you, Dayna, for writing my favorite kind of review :-) ;-)
I am always delighted to find poets who share my love of finding new ways to combine words. I love it when a writer combs through the usual interpretation of live, fantasy, fire, and cobwebs, and finds the golden thread that can bind them. A good poem may have either perfect discipline of order, or delightful whimsy, but when a poem combines both, the new possibilities widen our view and allow us to share our experiences.
The small jewels shared, are definitely enough to make me want to read the rest! Thanks
Must be the scientist in me; I’d been expecting the Mark Kurlansky book!
Signature sent me a link to this review–thank you so much, Dayna, for your engaged and insightful reading! It warms my heart to learn that you responded to the imagination and energy I tried to put into the poems. And I learned a new word from you–“metrophobia”–although I wish no one had it.
Susan, if you’ve published your presentation on tension, I would love to read it. I found your thoughts on the subject to be very insightful.
And I really love this book. I will read it again and again.
I wish no one had metrophobia, too.