Selected Poems (New California Poetry, 3)

Rating:
Summary: The assembled wonder
Review: The title of this book deceives. Indeed it is a "selected" but is no mere anthology of works. The poems are chosen from books spanning decades, but are re-ordered, re-sequenced, in some cases even excerpted out of longer poems to create a new--completely new--book.

The poems are kept short. The compression serves to lull but release power at the same time. Imagine Fanny Howe whispering visions in your ear while you are in the dream-state between sleeping and waking.

I love Fanny Howe because she has simultaneous concerns that never outweigh each other: a commitment to a first-person lyric while engaging the experiments of modernism and language-poetics, a mystical attention to religious experience coupled with a very real and political engagement with daily material condition, a fiesty resistance to form, but a conquest of that same territory.