676
PARTISAN REVIEW
antithesis to spirituality. We are confused, then, about just how this poet sees
the relation between body and soul. The volume opens on the old trope of
sex and death, with a Beckett-styled inversion that makes death the tenor.
"It will take you
I
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
lor
so sweet and slow you'll scream give it to me give it to me until it does."
The poem swerves rather close to lurid fantasy, threatening to invert the
metaphor again. What saves it, once again, is a well-timed smirk, an interlude
or prepubescent images which cut the high-drama with self-amusement:
"Nothing will ever clench this hard.
I
At last (the little girls are clapping,
shouting) someone has pulled
I
the drawstring of your gym bag closed
enough and tight.
I
At last
II
someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it
won't ever come undone."
But Howe's best poems refuse to make the body the measure of the
soul. When she moves outside her subjective vision to meditate upon great,
mythic moments, she is able to telescope a diversity of images into a unified
spiritual concept. The fall of Eve is such a moment, recorded in the prose
poem, "Part of Eve's Discussion." In a long, periodic sentence loading simile
upon simile she expands and particularizes our understanding ofa subject that
has no literal name.
"It
was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat
from your hand, and flies,just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to
stilI and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm..."
Howe underemploys not only her talent for dramatic compression, but
for aphorism, paradox, antithesis, proverb, those means of conceptual com–
pression. But she is clearly drawn to the Biblical parables and gospels and
makes good use of them in "Isaac," "Retribution," "The Unforgiven," and
elsewhere. "Without Devotion" presents spirituality not in terms of demonic
possession but in terms of faith and charity. Howe may well have a career
as a poet of spiritual instruction, along the lines of Ezra Pound but without
his
hieroglyphic:
Cut loose, without devotion, a man becomes a comic.
His antics are passed
around the family table and mimicked so well, years
later and the family still laughs.
Without devotion, any life becomes a stranger's story
told and told again to help another sleep
or live.
Poems such as this one inspire confidence. This poet may
be,
after
alI,
a
