That This by Susan Howe

Susan Howe’s latest book published in 2010 by New Directions points us toward experiencing the contradiction between “feelings and thoughts”, “sounds and objects”. To accomplish this Howe tells us the story of her emotions, as well as records her associative philosophical musings, while grieving the death of her partner the philosopher Peter Hare. At the same time, she stitches in quotes from Sarah Edwards’s reaction to her famous husband Jonathan Edwards's death during the 18th century in New England. The book is divided up into three distinct sections: the first called “The Disappearance Approach” is in prose and includes Howe’s memories surrounding her husband’s death; the second are collages of cut-up sections of the diary of Hannah Edwards Whetmore (Jonathan’s younger sister) called “Frolic Architecture”. The collages were done with scissors, invisible tape and a photocopier. Each page is like a word sculpture. Each sculpture gives one the full experience of a poem in its conciseness, ambiguity, and strange affect. Howe’s method takes an unexciting (though Howe I suspect would vehemently disagree with me) eighteenth century diary entry and transforms it into a visually edifying and linguistically complex object. The last section “That This”, named after the book’s title, for the most part is comprised of couplets, though there are a couple formal deviations. This section has various mediations on presence and absence, lightness and darkness

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed

One is brought into the experience of losing a loved partner through the visual, which in this case includes poetic form as well as poetic image. Howe is truly a poet of expansive formal and philosophical range of which this book is an apt example. That she will come out with another moving and challenging book, I am quite sure.