Trappings: New Poems [Paperback]

Richard Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

"Trappings reminds us how, for decades, Howard's is the gold standard for those who care about the shape sound and wit of a poem."—Boston Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Richard Howard has always been a poet of marvelous and multiple personae. In the course of 10 volumes of verse he has spoken in the voices of John Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Robert Browning--not to mention the less cultivated, more homicidal narrator of "At Bluebeard's Castle." In Trappings, he continues in this vein of poetic ventriloquism. "Family Values," for example, finds the blind Milton dictating to his daughters, who grow quite vocal in return. Here is Anne, protesting her duties as a recording angel:

It is always I who must relieve
my sister where she stands, taking the words
from him, terrible words out of the air
as they come, unceasing, to us. I sit,
sewing the while, until our Deborah
fails, and when the silence falls, I begin.

The playful convolutions of speech, the faint inflections of character--these are Richard Howard's stock-in-trade. Yet the most effective pieces in Trappings are those in which the poet speaks for (more or less) himself. "The Job Interview" recalls a nerve-wracking encounter with André Breton, whose Nadja the young poet hoped to translate. Given the surrealist panjandrum's "legendary loathing of queers," Howard kept his sexual preferences strictly under wraps. Forty years later, his translation "is still in print, and people still hate queers. / I allay that heart of mine with the words / Breton wrote to Simone, first of his wives / (and a Jew like me): / criticism will be love, or will not be." This is about as close as Howard, a formalist to his fingertips, will ever get to the confessional mode. But the simplified syntax and first-person directness suit him well--and while he'll always remain an essentially dramatic poet, it's a pleasure to see Richard Howard go head-to-head with (as he writes in "At 65") that "garrulous presence / we sometimes call the self." --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

This first collection in five years from the renowned translator (Gide, Baudelaire, Barthes, etc.), editor, critic and homme de lettres et bons mots, frolics among chatty, artsy figures sardonic enough to laugh at themselves without losing their urbane sense of control. As usual, Howard's consistentAperhaps insistentAattention to art and its milieu is compelling for the dramatic contexts he unfailingly provides; even poems not meant as monologues come off as such, so dominant is the rhetorical tone in which personality, style and whimsy playfully meet. His voices, whether appreciating Renaissance court-life, Canaletto or Muriel Rukeyser, are clearly related, each speaker adroit at allusion and cute word-play ("a manatee must emanate"). Such animated pairings are the plat du jour, inspiring mad confrontations between 19th-century models and artists (Balzac sitting for Nadar in "Avarice 1849: A Distraction"; "Eugene Delacroix: Moorish Conversation, 1832"), or a Tanning sculpture's parts: "She came to him in dreams, as he to her/ in waking. And that was how they would meet,/ ever wrong from the start, however right/ for the act." The volume's centerpiece is the sequence "Family Values," each of its five parts musing on a different depiction of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters, from the perspective of the daughters ("Only because I see my sisters hiding/ are they hidden too from the sightless seer/ who is our father"), sly, worried curators and professionals. Other discursions, like "Mrs. Eden in Town for the Day" or "Our Spring Trip," a letter from a fifth-grader to her principal, revel in suburbia, while a scattering of poems on gay life are poignantly immediate compared with the poet's more cagey cast of characters. A moveable feast. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 81 pages
• Publisher: Turtle Point Press; 1 edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885983433
• ISBN-13: 978-1885983435
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 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: #4,181,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars another suberb collection from an established master, June 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Trappings: New Poems (Paperback)

Richard Howard continues to dazzle us with his wit and erudition and uncanny ability to enter the consciousness of his chosen personae. But there is more to savor in this recent collection than the riches we are used to from Howard. These recent poems move us also with their fearless risk taking and depth of feeling. This is poetry for lovers of great poetry in the tradition of Browning and, yes, William Shakespeare.