On the Ground

by Fanny Howe

A spiritually resonant and politically urgent new collection by the winner of the Lenore Marshall poetry prize

My father was a soldier
who was smaller than my son

when he returned as a ghost.

I begged him to stay with us
but he said: "Not until you come to life."
-from "[Untitled]"

Fanny Howe's bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived "on the ground." While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Jade Gu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on a rocking chair at city lights

[Boxhuman · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first the poetry is very vague and hard to get a sense of, but in the middle it really picks up. Most of the poems are very long, but have short, separated stanzas that don't seem detached from the original intention of the poems. Christianity is a theme throughout, but isn't preachy, more like an examination and comparison to humanity.

Her fixations seem to be eyes, sky, and ash, but aren't used to the point of exhaustion. And even though punctuations are almost completely absent (one of my pet peeves), I still appreciated each poem and its structure.

I really liked the following:

from Forged
"bought a hat got a life/since everything looks like its waiting to end/except for the stuff that's not made by hand"
"that she may turn all words back into prayers/that they once were"

The Dragon of History
"In my experience//the angel with his wings up/is trying to kill the dragon of history//to prove that air is stronger than the objects in it//and if he wasn't made of stone, he would."

On the Ground
"Morning dusk- his figure furry//Threads of gray hair//and outside, a world without a leader"
"Maybe the end of the world happened long ago/A whirl as quick as Judas breaking his neck/and every sound is an echo"
"Poor love in the order of existence//subsists on passivity inside this skin/where pain has cut a pattern//and a red heart's a little devil/speared by its own hand"

Kneeling Bus
"Satan announces himself without sense/I am pro-life, I kill from a distance."
"The ocean is like biting an apple/Gray-textured foam/or a diamond in crumpled paper"

The World Bank
"D--th = perfect math//elective affinity/where body and mind are combustible//in the choice work-furnacy"
"The pile on the skyline/is gun-metal bright//(not olive trees alive and silver)//if the men who describe them are right"

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small silver face out of the gray

I call it a deer in a phantom forest
Baader-Meinhof with a future

Smoke of assassination
Burning of oil

Maybe it's trees that have broken away
Or clouds around them

A dragon-shaped smear on a window


But there is a moment of clarity
When nothing is out there

Now I call is an asshole
In fiery red clothing

Light shoots from its finger
Like wind with hair

Is it an alien cowering
In the rape robe of war?

Mother and child on an icy globe?

Or just the eyes of day

- Far and Near, pg. 3

* * *

I always knew I had no right to be
Eating filling becoming wept

Sold by tickets to this trip myself
A fiction as fixed as the crucifixion
or tracks hammered into banked quarters

where logic can carry you to hell
but gives a spatial unity that in essence is emotional


Did I have faith or was it hype

Q of changing names and physical fates
Erasure calling from the lips
No sleep! An end constructed as an opening

When a self has no right
in relation to its words but bears false witness
from a block of slush and Christmas drinks

[...]

- Forged, pg. 12-

* * *

The first person is an existentialist

like trash in the groin of the sand dunes
like a brown cardboard home beside a dam

like seeing like things the same
between Death Valley and the desert of Paran

An earthquake a turret with arms and legs
The second person is the beloved

like winners taking the hit
like looking down on Utah as if

it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan
like war-planes out of Miramar

like a split cult a jolt a coke New York
like Mexico in its deep beige couplets

like this, like that . . . like Call us all It
Thou It. "Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!"

The third person is a materialist.

- 9/11, pg. 23

* * *

Satan fell behind, it was a taxi's shadow
where Man put his foot on the sidewalk

His mouth covered mine and he was gone

Italo once said a kiss no the mouth is the sign of betrayal
and pointed as Judas in the painting

(his muscular hand, his brush)

There was an ache in the canvas he has speared himself

That was the day when rain fell until twelve
outside the studio and twelve months before that shadow


Not a rink but ashed-over ice
Rain on a windshield, a green light

Apartments made of dirt, neon
hangers outlined in the cleaner's window

I think proximity is the abyss
between God and us because

every fabric of my body is trying
to know why saying

I love you
in a time of extreme necessity

[...]

- On the Ground, pg. 33-

* * *

My church the bus
is padded with shadows

Wing-colours in winter
Sky like fractured smoke

So many corpses
to cope with
The white sheets
Infirmities bandaged

Wool-capped heads
and wheelchairs
in the back of the MII
February, 2003.

A billiards bar
where a forest was
a nocturnal factory

past the Petrossian
restaurant building
snow white stone work

A mitten is pressed
by a nanny at 67th and Columbus

- Kneeling Bus, pg. 43

* * *

Where is everyone

when I am alone
with the driver

Is my recent loss
the cause of those footsteps

clicking to the sidewalk

Once the air was thick and links
that darted and jerked

refracting whatever
flashing of eye

were captured in its light


Now I think the dance of separated things
never began never being


Oh God, especially tonight!

- pg. 53

* * *

Where there is fertility, there is chaos.

A hundred years of turnover
and four generations later

we know everything about evil
in the public sphere

but what is a person
as a solitary seeker? How disassemble

the hypocritical
crippling factor in every body?

- pg. 61

[atito · Rating 3 out of 5]

this had a few more snags than usual for me, but it's a three-star fanny howe--not just a general three-star! was stunned into silence at this moment: "I should have been happier yesterday / but was dispatched by fate otherwise"

[Lightsey]

After my once-through. . . I'm not excited about the shorter poems that open this volume, in which Howe's politics seem to me to overwhelm her poetic approach. Also, there's a recurring symbol (a plane crash) that doesn't hold its weight. But the long ending poem has a sighing movement and a gentleness that I love. Interestingly, this poem's about riding on a bus (well, that's the setting/conceit) and I read it while on my chosen mass transit, the light rail--the coincidence of her setting and mine worked out well.

[Parvoneh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Fanny Howe is very very smart, but I think I like subtler/quieter voices than she presents in this collection.