The Europe of Trusts: Poetry

by Susan Howe

The Europe of Trusts  contains three brilliant, long-unavailable books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980  The Liberties ,  Pythagorean Silence , and  Defenestration of Prague . These are the landmark books––following her volumes from the previous decade ( Hinge Picture ,  Chanting at the Crystal Sea ,  Cabbage Gardens , and  Secret History of the Dividing Line )––which established Howe as “one of America’s foremost experimental writers” ( Publishers Weekly ). “Her work,” as Geoffrey O’Brien put it, “is a voyage of reconnaissance in language, a sounding out of ancient hiding places, and it is a voyage full of risk. ’Words are the only clues we have,’ she has said. ‘What if they fail us?’”

Genres: Poetry

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).

Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).

She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hound memory lie down

hare and the moon

Hurl shivering sacrifice
hearth to break in pieces

Finn like fire
Finn in magic mantle

Shouts of the blue men

weary of war

Elopement forays wooing and voyages

no written traces

Souls sighing thrash branches
Threshold of sleep

Scatter and ravening

Fairs held on hilltops
(mummer and strawboy)

Pastoral freedom of hills

Walk three time sunwise round the fire
Ensure a year

Vague Gods

Bed of the down of birds
My hair streams out as wind water

wood




twenty lines of

boughs bending into hindering
Boreas

the thin thaws wander off

Presence
October drawing to its long

late edge
Understanding of time endlessly

sliding
(trees hung with false dreams)

endlessly running on

Distant forget
Tiny words of substance cross

the darkness

Who are they
(others between the trees)

falling into lines of human

habitation
Tread softly my misgiving heart

To chart all

Versimilitude
Throw my body at the mark

Parents among savages
Their house was garlanded with dead

theologies
(fierceness of the young)

Then to move forward into unknown

Crumbling compulsion of syllables

Glass face
caressing the athwart night


https://archive.org/details/europeoft...
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[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most striking features of Howe's poetry is how affective and effective the language. There are a great deal of moments in her poetry where Howe's language doesn't make syntactic or narrative sense, but still conveys a certain rhythm or implacable meaning. Howe's work did not always make complete sense to me, but the construction and intricacy struck me.

This collection showcases some of the breadth of Howe's experimental style, particularly with the inclusion of The Liberties. This collection features an examination of female suffering at the hands of tyrannical patriarchal figures, particularly centering around Cordelia from King Lear and Stella, a major figure in Jonathan Swift's life. The poetry shifts between dramatic form and poetic form, adding to the complexity of the "performative" aspects of Howe's poetics.

One of Howe's strengths as a poet comes with her attention to polysyllabic sonic textures. Her works are always attentive to a sense of hearing the work, even if they are not necessarily meant to have a musicality to them. The sense of interrelation between lines, stanzas, and images also comes from her sonic sensibilities.

Her work is above all intriguing. It provokes thought and consideration, and is particularly helpful for poets who are beginning to look towards experimental forms and experimental language. Howe provides a point of entry for writers and readers to recognize the power of individual words and the work they do.

[Muthee BM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this the same week as My Life from a different vendor but both books were from the same library. Pythagorean silence is now a favourite though it took some time to get (dis)oriented by the words, to see how they moved my eyes across the page, how they moved my feelings, and their sound on my lips.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

who cares if you can follow along when language is useless anyway. Pairs well with Dickinson

[Loisa Fenichell · Rating 4 out of 5]

first quarter of the phd is over in a week and I’m feeling Susan Howe pilled and sooo smooth brained

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among my favorite of Howe's books, I go back and back and back to this text, obsessively re-reading into and around it, examining how it moves on the page, in my mind, what it says and evokes, how it sounds in my head or on my lips, where it places me and what it tells me of self, other, thens, nows, language, leanings.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally speaking I understand almost nothing of what Howe writes, but I love the work anyway. This book was mostly disappointing to me. Often skirting right at the edge of "sense" but feeling too abstracted and "brainy" and not rooted enough in language.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially found this less accessible than the others I'd read, but after two readings I think "Pythagorean Silence" is one of the most amazing poems I've ever read.

[S]

1937-
sister of Fanny Howe

[matt Sandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

splatter. swift. defenestration.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Original, brilliant, exciting.
Ellie NYC