What the Living Do: Poems

In What the Living Do, Marie Howe eloquently deals with the deeply emotional impact of incest and death on her life from childhood to adulthood. This very personal collection of loosely structured poems explores loss, memory, love, and transitory individual identity. The first section touches on the traumas of Howe’s childhood. In “Sixth Grade” the reader can feel young Marie’s palpable fear as the neighborhood boys tie her and a friend to a garage door and torture them, providing one of many negative male experiences in her young life. Howe’s, “The Mother,” depicts a tragic scene of an inactive mother observing her drunken, abusive husband ascending the stairs to his daughter’s bedroom. This is followed by the “soft drone of her daughter’s waking/ voice reasoning and rising,/ and the first slap.” Howe paints a bleak picture of an immobile household knowledgeable and frozen, listening without intervening. The second section allows readers to share an adult Howe’s pain as she witnesses her brother John’s death from AIDS. Howe offers a glimpse of moments of appreciating life despite death’s immediacy in “A Certain Light.” She writes, “so wakened that late night in one of those still/ blue moments/ that were a kind of paradise,/ he finally opened his/ eyes wide,/ and the room filled with a certain light we thought/ we’d never see again.” In “The Gate” and “One of the Last Days,” Howe and John face his death and the negation of love that accompanies it. The final section eloquently translates Howe’s further grief and feelings of loss over the separation from her husband, her sister’s death from cancer, and the death of another friend from AIDS. Howe struggles to find her identity amidst her loss and struggle with the impermanence of life. However, in “The New Life,” her marriage is reborn, and she understands the importance of living in the moment. The title poem, “What the Living Do,” is Howe’s celebration of this impermanence and the constant “yearning” which is always part of the living. As Howe catches a reflection of herself in a window, she pauses and reflects, “I am living, I remember you.” Although the weight of death is almost crushing in this collection, Howe is still living and finding herself.

In the poem "What The Living Do," Howe writes: "I'm gripped by a cherishing/so deep/for my own blowing hair, chapped face,and unbuttoned coat that I'm/speechless:/I am living, I remember you." Though these lines appear on the penultimate page of the book, they might as well function as a sort of spiritual and artistic thesis statement for its entirety. There is something exquisite in almost every poem here.As in her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Howe rescues the sacred trapped in the husk of the profane. The collection reads almost like a novella, as repeating and subsequently familiar "characters" appear in dreams and doorways, talk in italics, die after painful illness, leave her and return.Howe's poetry is at its strongest when she allows her imagery to do much of the meaningful heavy lifting. Luckily, she's at her best quite a lot here as in "Reunion," which "tells" about Howe's partner coming back to her after a separation. But Howe is too great to just tell, and so we get this: "The very best part was rowing out onto the small lake.../the long sigh of the line through the air,//and the far plunk of the hook and the sinker-/lily pads, yellow flowers//the dripping of the oars/and the knock and creak of them moving in the rusty locks." Howe knows that when there is so much to say, it's best to say little and show the beauty she's after through close attention to concrete detail.

I lost my brother in 2017 and two writer friends told me I needed to read this book. I'm so grateful for the recommendation. I love the author's language and honesty. Her rendering of this relationship made me feel seen.

I first heard the title's poem read on an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross. It floored me. I immediately bought the book. Howe's poems fit the bill when she says, "poems say the unsayable". Many of my thoughts that I have had about life, but have been unable to articulate, has been done in this collection. It should come as no surprise, as some of these have taken years, even decades for her to write.

I think one thing that makes these mostly elegiac poems so gutting and powerful is the directness of Howe's observations. She's an astute observer of internal and external realities and recounts what she sees with simple and direct language. If she ever resorts to using a metaphor it is only rarely and her best poems shun them altogether. The cumulative feeling is that of hard-won bravery, a willingness to look both life and death squarely in the eyes. This is, after all, what the living must do if they are to have any kind of life at all. While this collection can easily be read in an evening, I recommend reading them over the course of several days. Like most poetry, each poem should be read aloud several times.

The book is well written, poetry pensive and engaging.

While Howe's writing is fantastic and I cannot deny that, I did not expect my used copy to have writing in it. I am aware of that risk when buying used books, but the annotations from the original owner are truly distracting from Howe's brilliant work. Maybe check these sort of things before handing them off to be re-purchased next time.

This is a beautifully written book. Lots of tears as I read through.

Has quickly become one of my all time favourite poetry collections. Worth reading for the title poem alone. A book about life and death and everything in between. And about how we carry on because we have to. Howe has often been compared to Olds but her writing is more spare, less dense. One of those books I keep returning to.

Good