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What the Living Do: Poems
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1997
117 people are currently reading
7714 people want to read
About the author
Marie Howe
25 books337 followersBorn in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She received an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”
Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and NYU. She co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and NYU. She co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 523 reviews
December 6, 2019
I didn’t read these poems. I experienced them. It was like meeting someone and knowing, instinctively knowing, they understand. Howe’s words took me by the hand and were so affecting they went straight to my heart. She takes you in so many directions. You come to a crossroad and she gently suggests sideways options. I could read and go to either side and find a route that served me. I might meander along or force myself to take the direct route. Most importantly, any move felt right instinctively. Healing from loss has no time limits. Marie Howe helps us heal with wisdom based on experience. Her poems will catch you when you feel you might fall.
March 4, 2018
I just read Howe's latest book, Magdalene, where it slowly dawned on me that her endings are not of the standard "wow-'em-with-a-twist-or-sudden-truth" variety ordinarily associated with successful poetry, but of the sotto voce type. Soft-spoken. Simply there. To the point where the reader is leaning in a bit, as if to better understand its softness.
Anyone I mentioned Marie Howe to mentioned back this earlier book, one that has "Living" in the title but chronicles the death of her brother to the AIDS epidemic. Well, SOME poems do. Others are devoted to the innocently dark terrain of youth, where there's a Freudian field day going on without the one-legged sack race, and later, some muse on adulthood and trying to build a life with a boyfriend.
Before long, you realize you have one of these "Howe does she do it?" poets in your hands. It doesn't seem like much is there, and yet something is undeniably there. Let me try that, the erstwhile poet says, similar to the erstwhile short story writer who reads Hemingway and says, "Gimme that pen. This is easy." (This is followed by embarrassingly bad imitation trying to be original.)
Here's one of her simple ones. Simply beautiful, especially since, following the narrative of preceding poems and an abusive father to be avoided, it take on double meaning.
The Copper Beech by Marie Howe
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
watching it happen without it happening to me.
And here, in a poem about her brother, we see the velvet-soft ending:
The Gate by Marie Howe
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother's body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
Ordinary, in its extraordinary way. And I kinda liked it. And I kinda learned from it.
Anyone I mentioned Marie Howe to mentioned back this earlier book, one that has "Living" in the title but chronicles the death of her brother to the AIDS epidemic. Well, SOME poems do. Others are devoted to the innocently dark terrain of youth, where there's a Freudian field day going on without the one-legged sack race, and later, some muse on adulthood and trying to build a life with a boyfriend.
Before long, you realize you have one of these "Howe does she do it?" poets in your hands. It doesn't seem like much is there, and yet something is undeniably there. Let me try that, the erstwhile poet says, similar to the erstwhile short story writer who reads Hemingway and says, "Gimme that pen. This is easy." (This is followed by embarrassingly bad imitation trying to be original.)
Here's one of her simple ones. Simply beautiful, especially since, following the narrative of preceding poems and an abusive father to be avoided, it take on double meaning.
The Copper Beech by Marie Howe
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
watching it happen without it happening to me.
And here, in a poem about her brother, we see the velvet-soft ending:
The Gate by Marie Howe
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother's body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
Ordinary, in its extraordinary way. And I kinda liked it. And I kinda learned from it.
December 15, 2016
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
How do I talk about this? As we all know, the reading experiences that have had the biggest impact on us can be the most difficult to write about. Marie Howe’s second collection is often exceedingly dark, dealing as it does with her turbulent, often violent childhood, a wrenching breakup, and, most indelibly, the slow death of her younger brother from AIDS complications. And yet by the time she gets to the title poem, excerpted above, she has managed a kind of redemption, instilled a sense that every moment is thrilling in its own way, regardless of what kind of moment it is. As a reader, you believe her. Or at least, I did. The gratitude I have for this kind of reading experience is impossible to quantify but also, thankfully, impossible to shake.
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
How do I talk about this? As we all know, the reading experiences that have had the biggest impact on us can be the most difficult to write about. Marie Howe’s second collection is often exceedingly dark, dealing as it does with her turbulent, often violent childhood, a wrenching breakup, and, most indelibly, the slow death of her younger brother from AIDS complications. And yet by the time she gets to the title poem, excerpted above, she has managed a kind of redemption, instilled a sense that every moment is thrilling in its own way, regardless of what kind of moment it is. As a reader, you believe her. Or at least, I did. The gratitude I have for this kind of reading experience is impossible to quantify but also, thankfully, impossible to shake.
March 23, 2008
Marie Howe's second book is an immensely moving book about the death of her brother by AIDS. It is plain-spoken, narrative, intense. Instead of giving a review, I'm going to paste in one of Howe's poems and an excerpt from an interview with her that really gets at the heart of the book.
The Boy
My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer
night:
white T-shirt, blue jeans-to the field at the end of the street
Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,
and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.
And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him – you know
where he is – and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade of
kids
in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in
spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father
will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
-----------
From Interview:
John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely. That’s solely responsible--my involvement and response to his living and dying with AIDS. I wanted after that to make an art that was transparent, that was accessible to people who don’t usually read poetry, to my brothers and sisters—wonderful, intelligent, smart people who want to read poetry if they know what to read. Regular people. And I wanted it to be the kind of talk that people talk in sick rooms, where it is very direct and very understated. I wanted to make movies without the photographer’s thumb in the way. I wanted to get out of the way and let some of these things just unwind, so people could see in and have their own experience. It became very important to me to document some of the things that happened. Of course they are still transformed, but that became important to me. And then of course that influenced the whole rest of the book, deeply. I didn’t want anything about that book to be obscure. The situation was difficult. I wanted it to have a simple surface, but to allow in the depths that of course occur every moment in ordinary life. So it was very hard, and getting started was very hard. There are no metaphors and there is no slant. That was the main reason that book changed.
Now I want never to write anything personal again. I’m struggling with it a lot. This new work is personal, but it’s also deflected through some other stories and voices. It’s still so new it’s hard to talk about, but I really don’t want to tell any more biographical stories or use those stories as ways into experience. I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. It’s still in the stages where I’m showing poems to readers and they go, “No. No. Yes. No. No.” And I realize in the last two years I’ve been swimming around.
I wish I were a different type of writer, sometimes I do. When Johnny died I was walking with Stanley Kunitz in front of my apartment building in Cambridge. It was a few months after Johnny died and I was saying to Stanley, I feel as if something has me in its mouth and is chewing me. Everyone who has known grief knows this. I hadn’t known it quite yet, but it is nothing new to everybody else who has known grief. I said I feel something has me in its mouth chewing me and there is nothing for me to do but be chewed, and Stanley said, “Yes, and you must wait to see who you’ll be when it’s done with you.” Because I wanted to write right away, and I couldn’t, and I had to wait to see who I was going to be after this experience sort of had me for a while. I feel that’s what’s happening now. I have to wait and keep writing, but wait to see what really wants to have a hold of me next and who I am and then to write the next real collection.
The Boy
My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer
night:
white T-shirt, blue jeans-to the field at the end of the street
Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,
and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.
And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him – you know
where he is – and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade of
kids
in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in
spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father
will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
-----------
From Interview:
John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely. That’s solely responsible--my involvement and response to his living and dying with AIDS. I wanted after that to make an art that was transparent, that was accessible to people who don’t usually read poetry, to my brothers and sisters—wonderful, intelligent, smart people who want to read poetry if they know what to read. Regular people. And I wanted it to be the kind of talk that people talk in sick rooms, where it is very direct and very understated. I wanted to make movies without the photographer’s thumb in the way. I wanted to get out of the way and let some of these things just unwind, so people could see in and have their own experience. It became very important to me to document some of the things that happened. Of course they are still transformed, but that became important to me. And then of course that influenced the whole rest of the book, deeply. I didn’t want anything about that book to be obscure. The situation was difficult. I wanted it to have a simple surface, but to allow in the depths that of course occur every moment in ordinary life. So it was very hard, and getting started was very hard. There are no metaphors and there is no slant. That was the main reason that book changed.
Now I want never to write anything personal again. I’m struggling with it a lot. This new work is personal, but it’s also deflected through some other stories and voices. It’s still so new it’s hard to talk about, but I really don’t want to tell any more biographical stories or use those stories as ways into experience. I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. It’s still in the stages where I’m showing poems to readers and they go, “No. No. Yes. No. No.” And I realize in the last two years I’ve been swimming around.
I wish I were a different type of writer, sometimes I do. When Johnny died I was walking with Stanley Kunitz in front of my apartment building in Cambridge. It was a few months after Johnny died and I was saying to Stanley, I feel as if something has me in its mouth and is chewing me. Everyone who has known grief knows this. I hadn’t known it quite yet, but it is nothing new to everybody else who has known grief. I said I feel something has me in its mouth chewing me and there is nothing for me to do but be chewed, and Stanley said, “Yes, and you must wait to see who you’ll be when it’s done with you.” Because I wanted to write right away, and I couldn’t, and I had to wait to see who I was going to be after this experience sort of had me for a while. I feel that’s what’s happening now. I have to wait and keep writing, but wait to see what really wants to have a hold of me next and who I am and then to write the next real collection.
October 18, 2019
I cherish these poems. Howe makes love and loss specific, real, unadorned, ordinary, and beautiful.
So many gems in here: "What the Living Do," my favorite poem, alongside "How Some of It Happened," "The Last Time,""The Grave," "One of the Last Days," "Watching Television,""Separation," "Prayer," "The Kiss," "Memorial," "My Dead Friends," "Buddy."
Other excellent ones: "The Attic," "The Copper Beach," "The Girl," "For Three Days," "Just Now," "A Certain Light," "Pain," "The Gate," "More."
Re-read on 10/18/19, post-The Great Believers. Perfect.
So many gems in here: "What the Living Do," my favorite poem, alongside "How Some of It Happened," "The Last Time,""The Grave," "One of the Last Days," "Watching Television,""Separation," "Prayer," "The Kiss," "Memorial," "My Dead Friends," "Buddy."
Other excellent ones: "The Attic," "The Copper Beach," "The Girl," "For Three Days," "Just Now," "A Certain Light," "Pain," "The Gate," "More."
Re-read on 10/18/19, post-The Great Believers. Perfect.
August 14, 2011
"What the Living Do" manages to give me an unsentimental but still deeply felt picture of the pain of living beyond loss. The immediate occasion for these poems is the death of several friends and family members over what seems, in the context of this books at least, a relatively short period of time. The real focus, however, is not so much on the dying--the psychic and physical pain of disease, the fear of a passage elsewhere--as it is on the poet herself, or at least her personae. These are not elegies then; or at least not elegies to the dead so much as elegies to who we imagine we must have been before the clefts and rifts that the loss of those we love opens in our lives, or perhaps elegies to the selves we imagine we might have become. Finally, though, these are poems of hope. I would not call them poems of overcoming. Grief remains, and in some sense we become, as we age, people who remember the dead, in our voices and in our silences. But poems of hope in that they recognize that we do go on. This is what the living do: they go on, carrying with them acts of remembrance such as these.
August 8, 2018
My dad died in June. After, I felt so guilty every time I laughed at a joke or enjoyed a movie or stopped thinking about my grief for even a moment. How could I ever be joyful again when someone I loved was dead? A wise quote online helped me- my love does not lie in the pain of my grief. And the titular poem of this collection. Now, every time I find happiness, I respond to the corresponding guilt with Marie Howe's wisdom: I am living. I remember you. Death and mundane happinesses don't go together easily, but Howe manages to reconcile them.
February 19, 2017
This isn't the kind of poetry I usually read -- Howe's work is heavier on narrative and lighter on logodaedaly than my usual fare -- but I liked it. Howe's imagination seems to operate on a bigger scale than many poets: her individual images/metaphors/phrasings/word-choices may not always be the freshest produce on the market, but the grand arcs of the story she tells across the course of these fifty interlinked poems are richly imagined. I especially admire the brave way in which she confronts -- and finds meaning in -- moments drawn from many diverse facets of her protagonist's life (childhood relationships with family, sexual relationships in later life, her dynamic relationship with her religious faith, etc.), and the way she then ambitiously tries to *integrate* all these little pieces into a coherent picture of one person's emotional coming-of-age. I especially like how she depicts her protagonist's childhood interactions with her father, her brother, and the "neighborhood boys" and the way these apparently shaped her views on gender roles. It reminds me of the "Just-So Stories," the way she evokes the universal human desire to explain everything through cause-and-effect.
Although this book is very much a "concept album," the individual poems working together like little vignettes to tell a novel-sized story, some of the poems ("The Boy," "Buddy") do stand remarkably well on their own. Moreover, there are some fine images here and there: e.g., Howe's description of the marks her high-heels made in the snow, which looked like "exclamation points" as she walked in the more standard-looking footsteps of her siblings who had come before.
Although this book is very much a "concept album," the individual poems working together like little vignettes to tell a novel-sized story, some of the poems ("The Boy," "Buddy") do stand remarkably well on their own. Moreover, there are some fine images here and there: e.g., Howe's description of the marks her high-heels made in the snow, which looked like "exclamation points" as she walked in the more standard-looking footsteps of her siblings who had come before.
April 26, 2015
Reread this today on the subway and had to fight back tears; this book is as powerful as it was when I first read it so many years ago.
*
Original review from October 2009:
Oh I got this from the library, but my, I really need to get a copy for myself. Ivy, Tom and I saw her read at Poets House weeks ago and I loved the title poem so much, I requested this collection from the library. I had no idea she'd written "Practicing"--a poem Laura Rice read to us in Merion many years ago--and while, at first, her poems reminded me so much of Sharon Olds' "The Dead and the Living," they hit closer home the further I read. I want to know these poems so much better than I know them now. Do, do, do go and read it.
*
Original review from October 2009:
Oh I got this from the library, but my, I really need to get a copy for myself. Ivy, Tom and I saw her read at Poets House weeks ago and I loved the title poem so much, I requested this collection from the library. I had no idea she'd written "Practicing"--a poem Laura Rice read to us in Merion many years ago--and while, at first, her poems reminded me so much of Sharon Olds' "The Dead and the Living," they hit closer home the further I read. I want to know these poems so much better than I know them now. Do, do, do go and read it.
September 29, 2013
Poems of unsayable grief and the study of the minutes and breaths surrounding a death. The doing that is left and the getting on.
It is bleak reading with enough truth and generosity to redress the hurt.
.........
The Gate
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother's body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This -- holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
March 14, 2007
I read this book of poems in the Elliot Bay Book Store and it stayed in mind for months until finally, I returned to that same store and bought it. The poems are melancholy and plain. Just tiny stories about life with people who are dead or dying and I find them very pure and worth remembering. They should put poems like THESE on Metro buses. Now that would change the world.
February 25, 2022
I devoured this book and after it was over, I had the sharp metallic taste for poetry on my tongue, it never went away. Howe opened my mind to wordplay that wasn't too playful, that conscripted a message but somehow came across as unremarkable and stunning. The one time I saw her speak, her hair was enormous, she was late and all I could think of was how like the moon she is.
July 7, 2017
I took my boys to the public pool yesterday and finished WHAT THE LIVING DO, BY MARIE HOWE. I need to write a poem entitled "crying at the public pool". This is a gorgeous collection as a whole. It goes to the darkest places that grief and aloneness take the human heart and still comes up for breath, reaches for the light. I highly recommend it. Go out and buy it today. #twilareads2017
WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the the street the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living, I remember you.
-Mary Howe (p.90)
WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the the street the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living, I remember you.
-Mary Howe (p.90)
March 11, 2008
In Ms. Howe’s second collection of poems, she continues to mine the minutiae of daily life to create deep ruminations on mortality and the struggle to find joy amidst the difficulties of human relationships with the living, the dying, and the dead. The poems move through four narratives: recollections from a childhood wrought with sexual abuse and other difficulties associated with gender identity, the death of a gay brother, the death of a female friend with cancer, and a tumultuous love affair between a man and a woman. By juxtaposing these situations, Ms. Howe is able to trace the psychological effects of growing up with the fear associated with abuse, especially for females, and how that ties to an adult woman’s ability to deal with romantic love and its related issues of trust and commitment. This narrator clings to her dying brother, the only vestige of positive family identity left in her life, and finds it near impossible to love another man “without irony or condescension” (31). It is a harrowing and fascinating journey that Ms. Howe traces with expert precision and even manages to end on a positive note, with “a cherishing so deep/for [her] own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” and the human ability to “remember” everything (90).
February 11, 2017
This collection of poetry is largely an elegy to the author's brother who died of AIDS. This poem....which I first read in Will Schwalbe's BOOKS FOR LIVING...is simply poignant.
***************************
My Dead Friends
by Marie Howe
I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were —
it's green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I'll do.
***************************
My Dead Friends
by Marie Howe
I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were —
it's green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I'll do.
July 16, 2012
This extraordinary book of poems should have won the Pulitzer Prize and the NBCC Award. No one knows how to look at things that hard to look at with such clear eyes as Marie Howe.
Read
March 16, 2025“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later,
when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living, I remember you.”
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later,
when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living, I remember you.”
June 10, 2025
i loved this and often i was like wow am i about to throw up (complimentary) (but don’t worry i didn’t) and i think i will reread many times in the future. my favorite poems were the copper beech, the game (!!), the promise, the cold outside, the gate, one of the last days, what the living do, and buddy. so yes all of it. yes i did take pictures of basically every page.
Read
July 24, 2023 what happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk down a sidewalk without looking back.
i was the girl. what happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, calling and calling his name.
i was the girl. what happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, calling and calling his name.
February 18, 2025
The urban Mary Oliver! Her work is stunning and so beautiful.
May 4, 2022
tava pensando em o que falar sobre esse livro e lembrei dessa parte da letra de posing in bondage
"When the world divides into two people
Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to
And I can't unsee it although I would like to
Posing in bondage, I hope you come home soon"
"When the world divides into two people
Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to
And I can't unsee it although I would like to
Posing in bondage, I hope you come home soon"
December 22, 2024
Incredible. Poems I will return to again and again throughout my life
March 3, 2018
Very few works of literature deal as unflinchingly with the experience of loss and grief--in this case the death of Howe's brother--with Howe's lyrical power. She mixes poems about her brother's illness and death with a second set dealing with a family background involving alcoholism and abuse. It would have been easy for her poems to have slipped into what James Baldwin, writing about stories of African American youth, called "the usual bleak childhood fantasy," but she doesn't. She's survived, not unscarred, but with a graceful resilience that lets her make her way through the lingering shadows. A great book.
The best poems in a very consistent collection: "Sixth Grade," "In the Movies," "The Promise," "The Gate," "The Dream," "Prayer."
The best poems in a very consistent collection: "Sixth Grade," "In the Movies," "The Promise," "The Gate," "The Dream," "Prayer."
August 5, 2020
Harrowing, important and beautiful poems.
April 20, 2023
decided to read this on my brother’s birthday and i’m a wreck….
“when the compassionate fist of God opened and crushed her with gratitude and shame.”
“What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.”
“Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed
it would start to happen;
then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.”
“My brother promised me he wouldn’t die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me five years,
as clearly as he promised he’d be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,
and he was—he did come back. And five years later he promised five years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,
the worry that won’t let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober
and I thought, OK, I’m not. I’m going to see thirty and live to be an old man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn’t that funny?
—One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.
This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.”
“when the compassionate fist of God opened and crushed her with gratitude and shame.”
“What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.”
“Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed
it would start to happen;
then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.”
“My brother promised me he wouldn’t die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me five years,
as clearly as he promised he’d be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,
and he was—he did come back. And five years later he promised five years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,
the worry that won’t let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober
and I thought, OK, I’m not. I’m going to see thirty and live to be an old man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn’t that funny?
—One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.
This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.”
February 18, 2021
Omg How(e)!?
June 8, 2025
Brutal (sexual violence, abuse, sibling/friend death) and beautiful.
August 1, 2025
3,5
À part le poème éponyme je n’ai pas été particulièrement touché. Ce recueil traite principalement du deuil d’un frère et l’autrice mentionne tellement de prénoms que j’étais plus concentré à comprendre qui était qui qu’à ressentir des émotions à la lecture des poèmes. Malgré tout l’écriture était belle je lirais bien d’autres de ses recueils.
À part le poème éponyme je n’ai pas été particulièrement touché. Ce recueil traite principalement du deuil d’un frère et l’autrice mentionne tellement de prénoms que j’étais plus concentré à comprendre qui était qui qu’à ressentir des émotions à la lecture des poèmes. Malgré tout l’écriture était belle je lirais bien d’autres de ses recueils.
April 25, 2017
Required (re)reading after losing a family member. It's pitch perfect.
To read in tandem with:
Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog
/
Nox
To read in tandem with:
Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog
/
Nox
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