Concordance
de Susan Howe, Claudia Cohen, Grenfell Press, Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard College Library)
"'Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,' Susan Howe has stated. In Concordance, the limited edition of her new collage poems, she has created a fresh body of art, made from slivers of poetry and marginalia, snipped from concordance editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, and Dickinson as well as from facsimile editions of Coleridge, Yeats, the new Poems of T. S. Eliot, and also from various fields guides to birds, rocks, and trees. Inspired in part by the wonderful flower collages of the eighteenth-century British artist Mrs. Delany, here Howe takes up her scissors and carries further what one critic has called her 'poetic installations on the margins of the American literary wilderness.' Dipping into and snipping from such odd volumes as The Observer's Book of English Moths and The Secret Languages of Ireland, Howe here reasserts the polysemous nature of words half-spoken--and in her skimming flight transfers half-grasped meanings whole to the reader. Prefaced by the prose poem "Envoi," which meditates and puns on names, sources, and affinities ('Echo echo I love you breathe breathe'), Concordance presents a body of fiercely non-conformist poems. These works--full of transplantations and ghostly whispers, excisions and erasures, fragments of half-remembered bonds and newly felt correspondences--seem to lift off the page in 'rotating prisms.' Coursing through Concordance is an exultant, savage spirit of salvage, redeeming stories that seemingly can never be told, and yet (with the witchcraft of the omitted words somehow edging themselves back in again) making the old new and bringing--via split, treasured words--lost worlds home. Concordance, a first edition published in 2019, is printed letterpress on Somerset and Whatman in an edition of forty-six, and bound in Japanese Teachest by Claudia Cohen. The book comprises seventy pages of Howe's poems, accompanied by 'Envoi,' issued as a chapbook printed on handmade Whatman. The two books are enclosed in a slipcase made of Teachest and Satogami."--Publisher's prospectus (viewed 2019 February 6).
