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BEIN New Directions 1062: Paperbound.

BEIN 2018 4609: Second printing. Paperbound. Autograph: Samuel R. Delany, Buffalo, Sept 1999. Presentation inscription from Susan Howe to Chip Delany. From the library of Samuel R. Delany.

The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T.S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists.

The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpoint to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

New Directions paperbook ; NDP 755

The Nonconformist's Memorial

Silence Wager Stories

A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike

Melville's Marginalia.

American poetry > 20th century.

Poetry.

Poetry.