In Marie Howe’s aptly named collection of poetry “What the Living Do,” her poems are powerful because of their poignancy. The collection ranges chronologically throughout her life with the first part containing the poems concerning her youth; they read with the distinct language of a person looking back that is specifically emphasized by the descriptive nature of the writing in these pieces. The middle part, probably the most somber of the three, chronicles her experiences with her older brother John, who suffers and eventually dies from AIDS. The final part opens seamlessly with a poem of the moment when she recognizes that her brother’s death has become a memory and not so palpable “as if time were a/room/I could gaze clear across—four years since I’d lifted his hand from/the sheets on his bed and it cooled in my hand.” (p. 63) The language of this final part carries the immediacy of someone writing (in verse) about her life as she lives it.
Although there are clear demarcations of her life into three periods, the work in its entirety doesn’t feel disjointed; it’s as if each poem were a piece of poignant paper-mache—no less diminished when considered individually—that staggers the soul when seen as a whole.
Personally, the two poems that resonated the most profoundly with me were “A Certain Light” and “Pain.” Losing a loved-one is never easy. But losing a loved-one through prolonged disease brings with it a unique perspective. There is an emotional anesthetizing that Howe captures perfectly in “A Certain Light” with the deliberate and continual use of pronouns for the subjects of her sentences. The “He, We and His” serve the purpose of distancing the reader, and likely Howe as well, from the painful experiences that have become commonplace. It is not till the end that names—identities—are used:
“And Joe said, Look at you. And John said, How do I look?
And Joe said, Handsome.” (p. 45)
This is the experience representing (to use the cliché) the light that is brightest in the darkest of night. And yet, the emotional numbness while being understandably horrible is at the same time a merciful blessing which can be seen in “Pain”:
“And he did take the morphine, and he died the next week.”(p. 52)
We see a return to the use of pronouns that allows for a distancing from the pain so that it can be absorbed at a rate that only the sufferer can know to be acceptable.
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