May 19, 2013
Marie Howe
continued
Here's an example of what I mean from "Memorial," a poem near the end of What the Living Do. The poem describes the illness and death of another young man, Billy:
| and something began to move through the room, as if energy were rising, like thickening air, as if spirit were pleasure pushing through the room, through even our faces, a molecular, invisible . . . If this was Billy he was so vast — the way one field leads onto another, vast to have been contained all that time, in that body, — a nearly unendurable joy a steady outpouring for over an hour so that when the men came back from dinner they found Billy dead in the sheets and the three of us almost drunkenly smiling. |
That seems to me to be an exact presentation of moments I have had watching my loved ones die — a moment that mixes grief with something else I haven't been able to define. This poet helps me understand it.
Marie Howe reads from her poetry at a campus location TBA on Monday, January 22.
[Review published January 2007]
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