Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Susan Howe (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: November 17, 2007

Souls of the Labadie Tract finds Susan Howe exploring (or unsettling) one of her favorite domains, the psychic past of America. This time the presiding tutelary geniuses are Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens.

Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and material scraps. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress which ends the book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Over the past three decades Howe has worked as a kind of poet-scholar manqué, mixing into her books prose explorations of early American spiritual and historical chroniclers and her own distinctive poems, usually terse, four-stress snippets that themselves seem like fugitive fragments from a larger suppressed text. In her newest book, Howe stands in thrall to a 17th-century history of Deerfield, Mass., and then chases down an obscure reference to Labadist in Wallace Stevens's family tree, which brings her to the story of a short-lived Utopian quietest sect, followers of Jean de Labadie who established a community in Maryland in 1684 that vanished within 40 years. It is in these vast tracts of time made intimate by texts, by language, that Howe operates: I keep you here to keep/ your promise all that you/ think I've wrought what// I see or do in the twilight/ of time but keep forgetting/ you keep coming back. Beginning with a quote from Jonathan Edwards equating the silkworm to a type of Christ and ending with a photograph of a fragment of the silk wedding dress of Edwards's wife, onto which Howe projects a text (I have already shown that space is God), this is intense stuff. Published simultaneously with a new edition (prefaced by Eliot Weinberger) of Howe's classic critical work My Emily Dickinson. (Nov.)
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Review

Howe's mode is gnostic interior monologue, in which the lyric voice is fractured- embodied and performed across time. (Artforum, Bennett Simpson)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (November 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217183
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217187
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True wildness, November 3, 2007

By 

Robert E. Lloyd (Deerfield Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

Archival excerpts from early Colonial history populate this space, energize it to starry heights. Susan notes "I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertaintly that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed they would appear to expand though they lay half-smothered in local history." We, the recipients of the unearthing, appreciate her brilliance. Those who recall Singularities will find refuge in the verses of 118 Westerly Terrace, such as "
Low in self abasement light
passes through linen as if
to offer heaven as if roof
will have no hold against
one hour shred of another
"
Emily Dickinson walks these pages also, as in "
For a long time I worked
this tallest racketty poem
by light of a single candle
"
The last page of this book fades with a trace of some mysterious writing, but does not bestow darkness.
She speaks of "concrete totality of singular interjections, crucified spellings, abbreviations, irrational apprehensions"..."details to oratorically bloom" and so they do, in this fine work.