Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003

by Richard Howard

The poems of Richard Howard are noted for their unique dramatic force and for preserving, in their graceful, exquisitely wrought lines, human utterance at its most urbane. Inner Voices , the first volume to draw together material from Howard's twelve books of poems, leaves no doubt as to why he has been called "a powerful presence in American poetry for 40 years" ( The New York Times Book Review ).

Genres: Poetry

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK Richard: I love Robert Browning too. But the last thing the world needs is a late-modernist Browning imitator who's still stuck in the nineteenth century. I mean, who's going to read a relentlessly highbrow poem entitled "Venetian Interior, 1889" (which features Browning and son lounging among Japanois furnishings, someone fetch the ipecac)? On the other hand, "Victor Hugo: The Deathbed Portrait" is a stunner (closing lines: "there is only / one pleasure -- that of being / alive. All the others are a misery.") As is "Oracles", an eloquent ramble through the wisdom, artsy trivia, and experience of an elderly Greek woman: I wonder whether David Markson may have absorbed that one before essaying his late-period novels?

[Ahmad Syakir]

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