The Nonconformist’s Memorial

Susan Howe

Howe has continued to produce work of meditative urgency unmatched in recent American poetry.

Geoffrey O'Brien, Voice Literary Supplement

The Nonconformist’s Memorial

Poetry by Susan Howe

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. Howe 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 counterpoint 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.”

Buy The Nonconformist’s Memorial

Paperback(published Jun, 01 1993)

ISBN
9780811212298
Price US
16.95
Portrait of Susan Howe

Susan Howe

American poet and essayist

Howe has continued to produce work of meditative urgency unmatched in recent American poetry.

Geoffrey O'Brien, Voice Literary Supplement

Howe has continued to produce work of meditative urgency unmatched in recent American poetry.

Geoffrey O'Brien, Voice Literary Supplement