What the Living Do: Poems by Marie Howe 1998

I wasn’t aware of the American poet, Marie Howe until I read Adam Moss’s interview with her in “The Work of Art”.  Intrigued by her comments, I found this book at the Cambridge Public Library.  Around the same time, my wife sent me an Instagram post which featured a Buddhist monk reading the eponymous poem from this volume.  Suddenly, Marie Howe seemed to be everywhere.

Howe was 48 years old when these poems were published in 1998.  With an MFA from Columbia and teaching experience at Dartmouth and Tufts, she had been chosen for the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1989, and her work had been praised by Academy of American Poets Chancellor Arthur Sze who wrote that “Marie Howe’s poems are remarkable for their focused, intense, and haunting lyricism. Her poems characteristically unfold through a series of luminous particulars that gather emotional power as they delve into the complexities of the human heart. Her poems are acclaimed for writing through loss with verve, but they also find the miraculous in the ordinary and transform quotidian incidents into enduring revelation.”

I found those words to be spot on, especially the ‘writing through loss’ as these poems are filled with the particulars and specifics of trauma and sadness.  Howe writes of losing a brother to AIDS, a friend to cancer, and another friend from unspecified causes.  The absence of John, Jane, and Billy fill these pages with their loss and the grief, sadness, and emptiness that Howe experienced.  The first section of the book is devoted to more sadness, in this case her traumatic and destructive family—a father that sexually abused her while her mother and brother listened on, unable to intervene or save her and a brother whose head was shaven by the father as punishment.  And on and on, an almost unbearable burden of pain and sadness to which Howe responded by writing.

This is not one of those books of poems that raise the spirits and bring a smile. Rather, it’s a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a reminder that ‘everyday is all we have’, per Joan Didion.