The Nonconformist's Memorial: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811212298)

The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. How is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

Author: Susan Howe
ISBN-10: 0811212297
ISBN-13: 9780811212298
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 06/17/1993
Pages: 160
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 9.01h x 6.04w x 0.45d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/12/1993