On the Ground: Poems [Paperback]

Fanny Howe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

A spiritually resonant and politically urgent new collection by the winner of the Lenore Marshall poetry prize

My father was a soldier
who was smaller than my son

when he returned as a ghost.

I begged him to stay with us
but he said: "Not until you come to life."
-from "[Untitled]"

Fanny Howe's bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived "on the ground." While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Simultaneously tender, political, lyrical and global in scope, this set of short sequences from Howe (One Crossed Out) has at its core the belief that love plays a redemptive role at all scales of interaction, giving intense force to grapplings with intimacy: "I think proximity is the abyss/ between God and us because// every fabric of my body is trying/ to know why saying// I love you / in a time of extremity is a necessity." Howe buttresses details drawn from individual lives with explorations of good and evil not as justifications for action, but as things to know and act from: "I am no one./ I know hell and have hope." Though elsewhere Howe has reinvented Catholic imagery fascinatingly, her direct engagements of it here can be flat: "Satan announces himself without sense/ I am pro-life, I kill from a distance." "The Dragon of History" is similarly brittle, as are some of the explicit references to September 11, the Iraq War and the second intifada. But such facts on the ground carry an anger that in turn carries these poems throughout—"Not even a postage stamp/ and not the spit for it"—revealing connections between small and large, here and elsewhere, where "Time covered sky/ over multiple eyes."
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Review

"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.' Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; 1st Ed. edition (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974031
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974039
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,579,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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