Poetry Friday: Marie Howe

Poetry Friday is hosted by Kate at http://bookaunt.blogspot.com/   

Marie Howe's moving tribute to her brother, What the Living Do, is one of those books I turn to whenever I need to be reminded that I am, perhaps, focusing on the irrelevant and the transitory at the expense of what is lasting and true. Here is Marie reading "The Gate" - one of the loveliest and most haunting poems in this volume:

In an interview about her poetry (which you can read here: http://bombsite.com/issues/61/articles/2105), Howe talks about the manner in which her brother's death was a transformative experience,  when "the world, the actual “is-ness” of it became and remains very precious to me‚ the wind, running water, voices."  I think this ability to capture the "is-ness" of experience in the world is what makes Howe's poetry especially beautiful to me.  Here is another poem I love to share with my students to explore the idea of having special places to "escape" to, places where we can find a deep kind of  connectedness and calm:

The Copper Beech

By Marie Howe

Immense, entirely itself,

it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it

and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,

I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.

You can learn more about Marie Howe, and read some of her poetry at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1687  .