Skip to main content

Featured Poet: Sarah Howe

Eyewear is very pleased, this hot Friday in London, to welcome British poet Sarah Howe, pictured.  Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983. She studied English at Cambridge and as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. She is currently finishing her PhD on Renaissance literature before taking up a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2008, she won the inaugural London Review of Books Young Reviewer Competition. Her debut pamphlet from Tall-lighthouse, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award this year.  She is one of the emerging poets to watch.

Woman in the garden

after Bonnard

What you see on entering a room –
            the red-checked
blouse, burning
on a chairframe in the attic crook,
            will last a lifetime.
 She smiles to see her slim form continue
            in the sunlit legs
of the stool, the lilac towel fallen across its face,
            and she thinks –
wisteria peeling from the house one mid-April –  
            head cocked
as if marooned on the way to a word.

           
            Mustard flashes
wildly up the wall: the mirror
            is a locked garden
and sometimes she visits that country.
            Through its keyhole
            the stool in miniature
wades a cobalt sea, or some accurate idea of sea –
            a greybird
            with salmon feet
engaged in telling things new
            a song veined
with rust from the throat.
           

She wants someone who will teach her the names
            of trees
their alien natures: the mimosa’s trembling
            yellow and the ornate
mainmast of the ash. The only thing she ever
            longed for
was an enamel bath, the running water
            tinged
with cochineal, a window, somewhere
            heightening the tone –
            the bay at Cannes,
the mountains of the Esterel.

poem by Sarah Howe



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".