Pierce-arrow / Susan Howe.

New York : New Directions, 1999.

xi, 144 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

"A New Directions paperbook original NDP878"--Page 4 of cover.

Susan Howe's book of poems takes as its point of departure the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive nineteenth-century philosopher on the periphery of the academic and social establishment yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing. Through Peirce and his wife Juliette, a lady of shadowy antecedents, Howe creates an intriguing nexus that explores the darker, melancholy sides of the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American intelligentsia. George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, are among those who also find a place in the three long poem-sequences that comprise the book. Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is--the connections between seemingly unconnected things--as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."

English

June 01, 2002