That This
Susan Howe
New Directions Pub.
What treasures of knowledge we cluster around. That This is a collection in three pieces. Disappearance Approach, an essay about the sudden death of the author s husband ( land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth ), begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, elusive remnants, and snakes. Frolic Architecture, the second section inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six black-and-white photograms by James Welling presents hauntingly lovely, oblique text-collages that Howe (with scissors and invisible Scotch Tape and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, That This, delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, although their orderly appearance packs startling power.