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.
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J. Webb
One of my favourite poetry collections
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2016