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have to, to avoid bad dreaming. It can hurt you
&
I need you."
The power of these closing poems is their honest scrutiny of dangerous
obsessions and unwillingness to sentimentalize alternatives. Brock-Broido's
poems never become paralyzed in irony or despair. More than Dickinson's or
Plath's, they insist that the soul retain its connection to life. The driving force
behind these poems-in their tightly synapsed images, their often lashing dic–
tion, their relentlessly sustained or brutally clipped sentences, their brilliant
timing-is the pressure of truth telling, of resistance to quick fixes and simple
stances, to all forms of escapism.
Two kinds of spirituality characterize Marie Howe's poetry. One is
demonic and exuberant, the other is compassionate and sober. One is Ro–
mantic, the other is Biblical. One accents gender awareness, the other tran–
scends it. She has mastered both, but the latter is more compelling and more
original.
Howe is interested in those intimations of spiritual and metaphysical
being which arise within ordinary domestic experience. She writes of obses–
sion and possession, as in "What the Angels Left." These angels recall
Rilke's, but even more those in Adrienne Rich's "Snapshots of a Daughter-in–
Law" who taunt the neurotic housewife. But Howe's angels, more a product
of rhetoric than of visionary neurosis, have a certain lower-order charm, like
that of Pope's sylphs. While Howe remains straightfaced throughout her
testimony, one senses a curl at the corner of the mouth, an awareness that
domestic mysticism can seem absurd. Too often, though, Howe loses this
salutary irony and yields to twilight-zone contrivances. "Sometimes, in rain,
there is an extra drumming, / and it's them.. ."; "the shadows have come
../
back, circling the room like headlights." Howe depicts herselfmelodramati–
cally drawn away from this world (both of domestic chores and human inti–
macy) toward some otherworldly power or voice which she can never quite
grasp:
c!
Understand, I love you, even as I turn from you like this
stumbling breathless down a dim and disappearing street behind
a man who squints at house numbers, bewildered, about to say
something I can almost hear.
Sexuality-tumid, passionate, violent, beastly, ecstatic-dominates the
terms of experience in
The Good Thief,
as in much recent poetry by women.
Sometimes it is mystical and self-transcending; other times it stands in
