The nonconformist's memorial
Subtitle: poems
By: by Susan Howe.
Series: New Directions paperbook ;; 755
Publisher: Published for James Laughlin by New Directions Pub. Corp.
Published: 1993
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 150
Description: The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T.S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists.

The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpoint to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."