Concordance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811229593)

"Only artworks are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals," Susan Howe has said. In Concordance, she has created a fresh body of work transmitting vital signals from a variety of archives. "Since," a semi-autobiographical prose-poem, opens the collection: concerned with first and last things, meditating on the particular and peculiar affinities between law and poetry, it ranges from the Permian time of Pangea through Rembrandt and Dickinson to the dire present. "Concordance," a collage poem originally published as a Grenfell Press limited edition, springs from slivers of poetry and marginalia, cut from old concordances and facsimile editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, Dickinson, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as from various field guides to birds, rocks, and trees: the collages' "rotating prisms" form the heart of the book. The final poem, "Space Permitting," is collaged from drafts and notes Thoreau sent to Emerson and Margaret Fuller's friends and family in Concord while on a mission to recover her remains from the shipwreck on Fire Island. The fierce ethic of salvage in these three very different pieces expresses the vitalism in words, sounds, syllables, the telepathic spirit of all things singing into air.

Author: Susan Howe
ISBN-10: 0811229599
ISBN-13: 9780811229593
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 05/26/2020
Pages: 120
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.50h x 6.00w x 0.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/18/2020 pg. 37