Monomania has its rewards…. The verse has an incantatory power, that shines through…. Howe’s images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest.

For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She’’s a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’’s rejuvenating power.

The germ of this extraordinary book is an elegy for the poet’s mother, the Irish actress and playwright Mary Manning. But in The Midnight, “elegy” resides in the space between verse and prose, word and image, text and textile, lyric and narrative, the everyday and the fantastic, Ireland and the United States. Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge.

Howe’s words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sun in another room––except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable. Her vocabulary includes the whole past of language. The words are magnetic filings that adhere uncertainly to a receding body of meaning.