Poems from Magma, PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, etc. The book starts with a quote from Borges about a supposed categorisation of animals with categories like "(a) belonging to the emperor", "(n) that from a long way off look like flies", etc. Scattered through the book are poems whose titles are these categorisations.
"Start with weather" includes the baffling couplets "whether the scrunched-up mind in its agony/ can parse the parakeet's tracks" and "whether guilt's deranged orbit/ jellies the tar of parking lots". In contrast, the 4 page long "Crossing from Guangdong" has much of the clarity and formatting associated with prose. "Earthward" has short lines (I don't know why) and is rather delicate. "(c) Tame" is a fable in an odd format where page-width lines alternate with short, indented ones. "Loop of Jade" has sections in prose, in 7-lined narrow sections, and a section which is fully aligned with one or two gaps per line. The prose is a bit clunky - "sometimes, rarely, my mother will begin to talk ... It isn't that this tacit contract is not tinged by our same daily fumblings". "(j) Innumerable" seems more suited to a prose book.
I like some fragments - "eyes aware of several kinds of dark/ struggling to perfect themselves/ - the hidden chair, the bouquet of our clothes" (Night in Arizona), etc. "(d) Sucking pigs" is a sonnet with a final rhyming couplet, the final line being a footnote - a cute idea. "Woman in the Garden" is my favourite piece. I like "There were barnacles ...]" too.
There are 1.5 pages of notes - interesting, but they only solve a few of my problems.
Other reviews
- Ben Wilkinson (winner this week of this year’s TS Eliot prize, the poet attempts to merge personal accounts of her dual Anglo-Chinese heritage with her scholar’s penchant for the intellectually abstruse. The result is a book of poems that are as playfully and frustratingly recondite as they are memorable and unusually affecting. ... Depending on a reader’s taste, these poems will seem either elegantly graceful, or decorative and over-designed. “Night in Arizona” is a prime example of the best and worst of this style ... too often Howe opts for an unconvincingly heightened and florid register – in “Pythagoras’s Curtain”, “cicadas … cadenza the acousmatic dusk”; “A Painting” lays it on thick with “the oyster-crust … of an unscraped palette – chewy rainbows, blistered jewels” – instead of working harder to write with the difficult clarity and complex simplicity of which she is capable)
- lonesomereader
- Tom Minogue (What’s most striking is how nimble these poems are, in spite of their numerous, dense allusions.)
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