Dan Chiasson Reviews Fanny Howe's Love and I

Dan Chiasson reviews what Fanny Howe has said will be her last book, Love and I (Graywolf, this month), for the latest issue of the New Yorker. "'Love and I' is a book about the frayed beginnings and endings of a person’s life, when consciousness provides no chaperon," writes Chiasson. From the review:

...It is full of excursions—a plane trip, a bus ride, a subway journey—that tempt us with their tidy trajectories (from then to now, here to there), only to swerve toward nonnarrative insight along the way. Many of her latest poems are titled with dates—“1941,” “1995,” “2016”—but poetry is hardly a source of linear order. Entering a person’s life at fluky intervals, it is, she believes, a “preoccupation” with “no motive, cause, or final goal”—a “vocation that has no name.” She writes poems “in the middle of children, crowds at train stations, airports, motels, bus depots, in offices and schoolyards.”

It is marvellous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life. The basis of Howe’s poetry is watchfulness, as from a train window. This passive, open state, a little like prayer (Howe is Catholic, and has written movingly about her faith), modulates surprisingly into politics. Here is the opening of “2011”:

On the last bus from Dublin to Limerick
Raindrops pelted the landscape
And held little photos
Of aluminum crutches in each drop
Rolling down the glass.

Find out what the view changes to at the New Yorker.