O'Clock

by Fanny Howe

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

21:00



Scared stiff and fairy-struck
Under the oak tree
Under the moon - pink hawthorne
By a stony well - very sacred,
Very stuff.



22:16



Powder the greens of hemlock, then,
in a disk of eyebright,
Mallow and self-help. Spin.
Discover the equation for delight
And never speak again.



20:12



This kind of fear knows no geography.

Just like a bleet

from a lamb in need, it tugs

for a teat in lady air
- blue lady air, the where-where.



pdf: http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/resour...

*

[Boy Blue · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real delight to uncover.

Of her residency in Ireland through which she created this collection Howe had this to say.

Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell. If you dropped me there blind, I would know I was in Ireland. The fuchsia, all the things that grow of their own accord there, became my company, which has been more difficult in America. In a general sense, the American person feels solitary and broken off from the landscape⁠—like in those wonderful paintings.

The interview goes on.

INTERVIEWER

The poems in O’Clock are an antidote to cynicism, I think.

HOWE

Oh, that’s true. But that’s been my job.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about that.

HOWE

If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.

You can definitely feel that sentiment through her poems

21:00

Scared stiff and fairy-struck
Under the oak tree
Under the moon - pink hawthorne
By a stony well - very sacred,
Very stuff.



22:16

Powder the greens of hemlock, then,
In a disk of eyebright
Mallow and self-help. Spin.
Discover the equation for delight
And never speak again.



Monday the First

After this girl was grown
the tedium of the nursery began.
Either overdressed or a mess
she was a metaphor
for the suffering of the Irish.
Seven boys and seven girls, a harnessed pony
and a clay pipe, delinquency laws and bad thin boys.
Out like a scout, she tackled the fields
in her hem or heels.
When she was dragged and staked
she called the story of her life
Where My Body Went.

She's a master of signing off. Like at the end of

Wednesday One

….

What do women workers want?

A place to act and recollect.
Our kind of job is out in the fields, hands

knee deep in mud. Hooch and a flame, a pooch with no name.
A home inside of the eyes. in sight of the eyes a home.

or the end of

13:13

Moths in a meadow
flutter like flowers — freed — their wings

take the shape of their mind the wind.

So it’s a spirit that keeps me
from breaking into pieces! the speed

would rip me apart without it.

So i should cover the wings of my shadow, ride it.

or the end of

Friday One

…

Grant me, Ma, the proletarian way to
perfection.
then fold back my unbelief
as you did my sheets.

or the final aphoristic line of

Winter Gone

......
Half of every experience is lack of experience

There's some great poems that you need the whole thing to get the effect. This one struck me as I'm also reading a WWII history at the moment.

Thursday One

Next time i’ll travel by dream.
Quick forward into first person.
i’ll try to avoid the world
where bombs obviate everything.

The twelfth century was when?

If i close my eyes my brain
rises with the train.
i’m in a town called Pontefract
where the men who bombed it

are only remembered for their technique.

Still i wonder if the birds
perched along the bridge
are singing — or were —
Oh let them burn!

You can tell that Howe is more at home with animals and the natural world, than the world of man. Often she'll explicitly tell you as much.

17:16

Sheep honk and cows shoot moos

into the air — some emergency
in gun-running country.

One cow has given birth to three.

When I get to choose
between following the lives of the beasts or the men

I still choose the latter, it makes no sense.

And there's lots of biographical material in here.

13:14

A red shirt for anarchy.
A white mask with no face on.

The immersers have returned —
firebrands and no mercy from them.

Still, people ask: if your muse was a boy
you loved at age fourteen and if you didn’t mistake

one later love for him,
then why this fear of men.



23:19

I feel like the end
of a long day
near Druid stones
and ghosts and hedgerows

thick as storms
where mist takes form
in a water garden.
It seems i am back

in Glan and want
to stay close
to childish things
like milk and sugar

in my tea, a mother
who calls darling
— to clouds darkening
the daily hills.

Sometimes it seems
my sight’s turned in
on a place dark green
and undefiled

and I am as old
as the young
will ever be.
No, I mean wild!

This one takes me back to the highlands

February Four

Iced stones in a nice hotel
Whiskey and jacket potatoes.

Through the porthole to the polar:
whisk-brooming snows
shred into the wind, hello
to the Scottish Highlands
where, in utter dismemberment,
the spirit unfolds to the animal
of its form.

They just keep coming

4:01

The edge of the dome is slipping
like a fool’s pudding
under silver. it’s dawn, i’m up

aggressively begging: God
give me a penitent hairstyle
and a cell — not a hospital —

to defend my errors in.
And no answers, please, to any of my questions.

Sometimes she angles for the philosophical abstract untethered to Ireland. They don't always hit but sometimes they do like the one below.

5:09

there is a city of terror where
they kill civilians outside

restaurants — guys
who are fathers and things.

Food is a symbol of class there
and cars are symbols of shoes.

People are symptoms of dreams.
Bombs are symptoms of rage.

Symbols — symptoms — no difference
in the leap to reference.

Until she writes her own eulogy

4:04

I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what i love:

oil, vinegar, salt lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed —

and the short northern nights.

And the best part of all this is you can read it all for free right here

http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/resources/OP_pdf_books/O'Clock%20pages.pdf

[Tcunniff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful contemporary poet, whose work is deeply felt, interior, and world-grappling.