502
PARTISAN REVIEW
relation to authority, and therefore to linguistic stability. Her art moves
between being captured and breaking free (her own terms again); such an
oscillation equips her to hear the sound of the unspoken, not
only
among
the captives but also among the victors. She has consistently addressed that
relation to authority which brands American traditions: "ambulant vagrant
bastardy comes looming through assurance and sanctification." In the early
poems style often registers aftershock, sometimes across a span of pages,
sometimes in bits. "Dragooned / I dined with destroyers," or, "knocking
her 0 / hero / / in the castle, doors opened like beggars." These books
reorchestrate prose from Holmes's Civil War diary and letters, and Edward
Gibbon; the Old and New Testaments rustle through them, and narratives
of captivity, but the touches are fresh: "At Cape Difficulty / science swims
in miracles." "Warriors wait / hidden in the fierce hearts of children."
"With a snowshoe for shovel / I opened the clock / / and we searched for
peace in its deep and private present. / / Outside, the world swarmed with
sorcerers." She ends the prefatory essay, "Close by [the family story] lies a
great forest approaching Modernism my early poems project aggression."
But that projection remains useful.
Gaps in Howe's poetry are routine, continuous, productive. Typical
poems run from nine to thirteen or twenty-three
to
twenty-seven short
lines, through brief clauses and suspended phrases, laddering theme while
suspending closure all along the chain. Often, spaces widen between lines
to enforce the same effect. Some poems shift into word grids, that is, five
or so words to a line broadly spaced, the lines again spaced widely, as if imi–
tating a Chinese lyric set out in literal translation. The result is meant to
be walked around in and bounced upon . "The Liberties" includes a Noh–
like spirit play about Swift's Stella and Lear's Cordelia in which these word
grids also enter. While all these stylistic decisions aim at preserving sug–
gestion while drawing intelligence into its service, the risk is that her
texture can seem as veiled and indulgent as it can seem rigorous.
Nonetheless, her gaps are not melodramas of deferred meaning, but pry–
ings-open of predication. I see them as her way of deriving from statement,
simultaneously, the ranges of both history and
50115
itistoire.
Published well after these four books,
Dljel1estratioll
if
Praglle
supplies
justification for this attitude and practice. "For we are language
Lost /
in language," and then , "near and far a fugue of fear / crisp aphorisms die
out." Section 12 of this book argues that history can be heard through
Sabine ears, that is, behind the name-clatter of a triumphal record:
" Nomenclator / anointed Latin memory of plunder / / mass migration of
women / / hid knowledge." Howe's stutter is meant to foster hearing. And
the early books under review here do that with both event and "vocables
/ of shape or sound," for example through a remarkable collage from
