Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe has been announced as the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

How exciting! I've been reading from her collection, Selected Poems for the past two weeks! I heard an interview with her via podcast at the Poetry Foundation and had to go out and get her book after hearing her voice.

In a 2004 interview with the Kenyon Review, Howe said this about her work: "If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle."

Here are some favourites from that book...

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I won't be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed —

and the short northern nights.

*
Moon ink is too bright to read.

You run your fingers over the print
and get some sense.

But then you lose it too.
It swims in a pool of logic

that you can't disprove
because it doesn't move.

*

Into the forest I went walking — to get lost.

I saw faces in the knots
of trees, it was insane, and hands
in branches, and everywhere names.

Throughout the elms
small birds shivered and sang
in rhyme.

I wanted to be air, or wind — to be at ease
in outer space but in the world
this was the case:

Human was God's secret name.

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