Like Most Revelations: New Poems

by Richard Howard

This brilliant collection of poems by one of America's most distinguished men of letters shows Richard Howard in a new phase: stronger, more resonant, more distinctive than ever. Two long, dramatic poems serve as the beginning and end of Like Most Revelations. In each, intimate perceptions are linked with the forces of the larger world: the world in which the speakers age, argue, founder, and face their fates. In between are twenty-seven poems ranging from monologue and epistle to elegy and satire. There are meditations on graffiti and Mozart, tributes to Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme, among others. Here too are poems of remembered identification and of dazed renunciation; poems of praise and poems of lamentation. Harold Bloom has called Richard Howard "the Robert Browning of our century," and certainly the monologues here have a power similar to Browning's. But they are also as immediate as today's newspaper. Superbly crafted and impressively varied, Like Most Revelations is Richard Howard's finest book of poems to date.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 1994

Reviews

[Mauberley]

A very good collection that, in the main, has held up well over the past 25 years. AIDS looms large in this book ("'Man who beat up homosexuals'..." is a strong example) but I thoroughly enjoyed 'Homage' and its memory of not meeting Samuel Beckett is thoughtful and charming. The "Culture and Its Manifestations" series is also very good. The narrator's excessive concern in preparing the corpse of Angelo Solyman for public display is a little precious ("A Lost Part") but in this poem, Howard returns to the 'dramatic monologue' that so delighted us in his 'Untitled Subjects' (1969).

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The longer dramatic monologues/dialogues are as good as those in earlier books, but the shorter and more “occasional/commemorative” poems are often not as interesting, in some ways not unlike what Robert Lowell was doing in so many of the “Notebook” poems.