I have written at length on the relation of words and images in this book, so I won't repeat that here. . It is posted on  Goodreads and Librarything.). She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.
Another good book to start with if you've never read any of Howe before. 53 or 73.) Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Two things affect the relation between writing and illustrations in this book: the ways the book refers to itself (and therefore to its illustrations), and the ways the illustrations are reproduced. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that readers of this kind of book will read everything, including the fine-print material on the back of the title page: and there they’ll discover a long list of picture credits, which sets the stage for these references even before the book begins: The photograph of the double map illustration by William Hole from Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton is reproduced by permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Fifty-three pages later we are introduced to the Stevenson book: “Several years ago,” Howe writes, “I inherited John Manning’s heavily marked up copy….” In similar fashion the title of the first of the book’s five sections, “Bed Hangings,” is explained on p. 43; it’s a book called Bed Hangings: A Treatise on Fabrics and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650–1850. This June, as we observe LGBTQ Pride—the annual celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning communities—we... To see what your friends thought of this book. 62, 68); and several photos with ripped pieces of paper—John Manning’s bookmarks—carefully arranged so that they reveal just what Howe needs to be seen (pp. Javascript is not enabled in your browser.

Refresh and try again. Start by marking “The Midnight” as Want to Read: Error rating book. For here we are hereBEDHANGINGSdaylight does not reach . Why is the page cropped as it is (it seems carelessly cut)? How such wideness of topic can be spun into such compelling narrative is the mystery we admire.

Beauty is in rare and unexpected places and objects. This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. From The Midnight Poem by Susan Howe - Poem Hunter. So this could be a good first book of hers to read, or it could be said to pick up where Pierce-Arrow left off, with a thread or two from Frame Structures and Bed Hangings pursued to even greater effect. In The Midnight's amply illustrated five sections, three of poetry and two of prose, we find--swirling around the poet's mother--ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, bed hangings, unfinished lace, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, the Yeats brothers, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Frederick Law Olmsted: a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. (It’s also in the wrong place for an emblem, which should be on the half-title page or posed as a frontispiece, not behind the half-title page, where no illustration would ordinarily go.).

From a formal point of view the fourth image is strangely careless: why is it so small?

(The tissue is apparently simulated; see Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, p. 187 n. 12.

For here we are hereBEDHANGINGSdaylight does not reach Vast depth on the wallNeophyteAlapeen Paper Patch MuslinCalico Camlet Dimity FustianSerge linsey-woolsey sayA wainscot bedsten & Curtans& vallains & iron RoddsMany bedsteds were roped"Bedsted. I'm not a big fan of anything experimental to begin with, but this was beyond all understanding, and the parts that weren't were such personal snippets of family history that they seemed only of importance to the poet herself. “The transitional space between image and scripture,” she glosses, “is often a zone of contention.”, 2. Editorial Reviews.

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There are also autobiographical references. This book, quite frankly, was awful. Editorial Reviews.

That fact makes me wonder how many of the other tissues in The Midnight were put there by Howe, rather than being bound or tipped into the books she read. There are several styles of photographs, which seem to have been taken in batches at different times: there are for example the photos with deep shadows; the photos that show an entire book open against a white background (pp. Click or Press Enter to view the items in your shopping bag or Press Tab to interact with the Shopping bag tooltip. May 17th 2003 Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site.

But Howe is too imaginative, too enthusiastic, too insistent on the fullest experience of meaning to leave it there. At the back of the book, in the photo credits, we learn that the photograph shows Howe’s mother “watching an aeroplane.” Perloff says that isn’t clear in the photo, but it is clear in the picture below, which is identified—again, only in the notes at the end of The Midnight, and not in the body text—as her mother’s “last address book.” An entry visible in it reads “Aer Lingus  800-223-6537.” So the Irish airline is in the lower image, and Perloff goes on to read the next entry, “Audio-Ears,” as a partial anagram of “Aer.” Perloff’s reading is very detailed, and she even mentions the two numbers that are crossed out in the address book. For here we are hereBEDHANGINGSdaylight does not reach . After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Top subscription boxes – right to your door, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge. Page This implies that the page itself is translucent, so we’re seeing through it. […] perhaps there is the surety that after a silence she will contact him again in bits. Secret History of the Dividing Line, Singularities, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, A fragmented elegy for the ghosts of mothers and books, Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2018, Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2019, Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2005. It's possible that this analogy, in 2003, would come across as trite or unoriginal. Of course in the original book, that doesn’t happen, so she has re-created the metaphor of the tissue veil, so that it makes the title page itself into the veil. The next page, which is the first page of text in Howe’s book, says that tissues were used “in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together”—a sign that the intimacy or correspondence of text and image will be in question throughout The Midnight. It’s possible to read “Lucifer has winged home” and “To other lands Liberticide.” This kind of palimpsest is a commonplace in contemporary visual art, and it signals several things: first, that this book will be concerned with type and writing as visual objects; and second, that not everything in the book is expected to be legible. (The proper word for this thin paper s “tissue,” not “tissue paper.”) That would be an example of an internal reference back to the theme of the tissue insert, but the page also refers to the word “hanging,” as in Bed Hangings.

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Thus there's a tendency to examine, sometimes at length, the underside of process, the thickness of what we do and especially what we say, when writing takes place, as the wind that reveals the silver underside of the leaves we'd otherwise never notice. (See. The fourth image, on the following page, is from an old book that the photo credits tell us  a History of Lace (1902), Howe has placed some partly legible lines over it in a typewriter font. Buy, enjoy, learn from this book. The photograph of the Charles Sanders Peirce manuscript 495 (1898) is reproduced…, Call those sorts of references external. 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 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 … From The Midnight poem by Susan Howe. I don’t think readers are asked to notice or assign meaning to these different styles or batches of photographs, and that is another sign of the limits of attention paid to the visual. the photo on p. 119, for example, identified as Howe’s mother in the back of the book, is itself carelessly photographed, in its paper frame, slightly but not meaningfully tilted, slightly but not meaningfully small on the page, with an indifferent amount of background or wall showing around it. Very enjoyable, layered, complex, philosophical and pretty.

Welcome back. If it was Howe’s intention that readers see “Audio-Ears” as an echo of “Aer Lingus,” then she should have chosen, cropped, formatted, and reproduced her images more carefully. This page works best with JavaScript. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Use up arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+up arrow) and down arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+down arrow) to review and enter to select. I agree with all that, but I don’t see it as having any especially interesting thing to say about the relation between images and writing. You can view Barnes & Noble’s Privacy Policy. Page Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published ), Some pictures are also formatted on the page in unaccountable ways: what is the reason for moving the picture on p. 131 to the right, so that it starts indented and overlaps the right margin?

There are many subtler examples as well: for instance Frederick Law Olmsted is introduced on p. 48, but Howe notes “So much for the person. . . But why be so insouciant about the photographs’ visual properties, given the trouble it took to collect and reproduce them? I also learned some stuff about starch.

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