Customer Reviews

Pierce-Arrow

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The author relies on her astonishing sense of sight and sound to produce a work of genius. At once transcending the notion of manuscript and propelling words beyond the limitations of poetic form, this book is as compelling as a narrative of the enigmatic Peirce as it is an experiment in the luxury of license. Her view of the poem as a visual object finds clear expression here amid the startling contrasts and congruencies of words. And she saves the best for last: the poem Ruckenfigur can't fail to impress, its angularity and perception bringing forth analogies to Alice Fulton. This book's beauty cannot fail to captivate.

"Pierce-Arrow" has a reach and ambition few books of history (or poetry for that matter) can match. Howe makes fascinating use of biographical fragments from the lives of American philosopher Charles S. Pierce and his 'gypsy' wife Juliette, George Meredith, A.C. Swinburne, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander Pope, and Theodore Watts-Dunton, with dollops of Husserl, the Iliad, and the Tristan & Isolde story thrown in for good measure. All these figures turn out to be connected in a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and the incidents Howe picks from their lives conform to a similar pattern: undisputed brilliance, Establishment rejection, long-suffering wives or caretakers, dangerous loves, ignominious deaths.

Howe's out to bring the archives to life in a way that recovers one of the poet's most ancient roles: to give a voice to the dead. But the connections she makes can seem so eccentric, so much like facts pulled out of a hat, that the work risks becoming a celebration of her own enthusiasm rather than an insight into her subjects' lives. In the end, I learned a lot more about Susan Howe's obsessions than I did about Charles Pierce's. That's certainly Howe's right as an author, but it tends to unfairly reduce Pierce's life and work to a pre-text for her own poetic concerns. Then again, I can't think of a poet since Pound or Olson doing anything this audacious with the archives. Her book is an absorbing, sometimes maddening attempt to transform neglected microfilm into myth.