POEMS OF INTIMACY AND WITNESS

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, January 4, 1998

Page: D3

Section: Books

There are many beautiful books of poetry published each year, but only a very few necessary ones. This is a book that many of us will need and be grateful to have. It tells the story of loss and grief, and something like recovery. Many of the poems are about childhood, especially about one older brother in that childhood: stubborn, brave, self-sufficient. ``I don't know if he knows he's building a world where I can one day / love a man -- he sits there without saying anything. / Praise him. / I know he can hardly bear to touch me.''

Many of the poems are about the death of that brother from AIDS. But to put the ``plot'' of a book of poems so bluntly is to lose a great deal. What springs forth out of this book is its lyricism and hopefulness, even in the face of terrible losses, and its peculiar, wry, loving brand of honesty. It is a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry by Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form, if I may say that without being hung -- a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation. Call it revelation rather than confession. It is kin to the work of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, a poetry of witness that does not exclude the personal. It also resembles the original confessional poetry of Sappho, written (and sung to a stringed instrument) about 2,500 years ago. This poetry is not a vortex of introversion; it turns inward and outward at once. It praises as well as blames; it leads, not toward despair and suicide but toward life, a celebration of the homely things ``the living do'' -- ``waiting for the plumber,'' shopping, washing up, the miracle of a lover's kiss:

. . . And when his mouth

pressed against my

mouth, I

opened my mouth

and the world's chord

played at once:

a large, ordinary music rising

from a hand neither one of us could see.

If God is present in this work, it is in the suggestion of some power outside the couplet -- the one line that stands alone, unlike the poet-narrator who finds herself stumbling after love: ``I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, / calling and calling his name.'' The poet sees herself in a clear, sometimes even scalding light of self-revelation, guilty of ``Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention'' and of petty self-centeredness:

And when we arrived at the promontory place

and threw the ashes into the wind that blew

some of them back into our faces,

I didn't think: This is Billy's bones and flesh . . .

I thought: Michael is taking charge when Billy said I was in charge of the ashes.

``How can a woman love a man?'' one poem asks. How can a woman love? is the unasked, larger question implied by the book. In ``Practicing,'' a bunch of seventh-grade girls ``practice'' their sexuality with one another, discovering more than they bargained for in the process: ``I want to write a song / for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire / just before we made ourselves stop.''

The love of the dying brother is another, deeper form of ``practice,'' as no one sees more clearly than he himself:

On one of the last days I told him, You know how much you love Joe? That's

how much I love you. And he said, No. And I said, Yes.

And he said, No. And I said, You know it's true.

And he closed his eyes for a minute.

When he opened them he said, Maybe you'd better start looking for

somebody else.

There is this wry, stubbornly honest humor even in the face of great pain, and a clarity of vision through the dark glass of hospital life, sickness, dying:

music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,

and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

and not know it was Chopin,

but something soft and pretty -- maybe not even hear it,

not really, until it stopped

-- the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you've passed it.

Even the love of the beloved, celebrated so delicately and lustily in this book, is another form of ``practice'' for something wider, larger, freer. Erotic love -- in whatever form -- thrills and constrains; it can also be deadly to the soul and to itself:

I have argued bitterly with the man I love, and for two days we haven't spoken.

We argued about one thing, but really it was another.

I keep finding myself standing by the front windows looking out at the street

and the walk that leads to the front door of this building,

white, unbroken by footprints.

Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost.

``There's no end to this'' -- suffering, remembering, loving, losing. But there is still wonder and delight: ``Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment / when, for one moment, nothing happens / no what-have-I-to-do-today-list -- for maybe / half a minute, the rush of traffic stops. / The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be / slows to silence. . . .'' There is the celebration of the ordinary, the daily, ``the buzzing blooming confusion of life'' as William James said and the refusal to see that as banal. It may not be all there is, but it is most, and often the best, of what we have. Let Marie Howe's last words have the last word:

. . . We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then

more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the

window glass,

say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing

so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm

speechless:

I am living, I remember you.