Fanny Howe's poems fail intellectually, they fail as ideas about poems, before they fail as poems; but the intellectual failure can be harder to notice, as the reader is so seldom in jeopardy of discovering what the poems are about. In her new book, the subject is evidently world politics, or so one surmises from the frequency of words like "history" and "dog tags" and "Qatar." That there are poems called "9/11" and "The World Bank" would come as confirmation, but when for dozens of pages at a stretch the settings are garbled halflyrics slung in neutral white space—

No tide that cries Have life!
is left in a drain
where fish have soft gums

They have been overcome
by Marketplace

Slime floats like a hubcap
in a stink of gas and rusty hooks

—the reader can be forgiven for wondering. (Are we meant to conclude that a tide that cries Have life! is left only in a drain where fish have hard gums? Does slime actually float "like a hubcap"? The "stink" of rusty hooks?) Howe's poems throw off soft clouds of profundity, and a billowing mystical authority attaches to her bombastic chants about "the people" and to her starry-haired celestial declamations ("I'll follow Jesus onto the M11 / with my sack of apples"). But in fact her poems are only half-articulate, and depend for their aesthetic effect on a category of meaning to which, at other moments, they pronounce themselves morally opposed.

This is what I mean about Howe's failure of ideas. In her lectures, in her stories, and in her essays—including the quasiphilosophical, quasi-religious, quasi-intelligible "meditations" collected in her volume The Wedding Dress—she has staked out a peculiar intellectual identity. She is a Catholic and a political activist, but at the same time her guiding principles are "doubt" and "bewilderment." She embraces positions which imply a definite metaphysical and ethical certainty, and at the same time she shares with Simone Weil an epistemological and social critique which regards the self as unstable, and certainty as a socially conditioned illusion. Her problem is how to reconcile her inclination toward the absolute with her penetrating doubt; and her solution, also influenced by Weil, is to embrace "bewilderment," a state of ecstatic uncertainty —"an enchantment," she writes, "that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability"—as a means of transcending the self and approaching, by a kind of wayward inference, the deepest nature of the real. "Bewilderment circumnavigates," she expounds, "believing that at the center of errant or circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent."

If the complete collapse of reference sounds like a peculiar point of origin for poetry, it is; words are referential. At times Howe's bewilderment seems to justify what must be very close to automatic writing—influenced by the mystical quietists, she has described herself as a voyeur of her own creative process, who merely jots down whatever comes through— but more often the complete collapse of reference is not really what is at stake. More often, Howe's poems surround an aggressively self-assertive and quite deliberately constructed tone of visionary conviction with a numinous, indeterminate haze that deflects criticism on both sides. If one objects to the vagueness of the haze ("Wet shoes drain the aches from human faces") then one has misunderstood Howe's intent, since after all her spiritual inquiry depends on this kind of indeterminacy. (It critiques the dominant discourse!) And if one criticizes the invariable platitudinousness of the visionary claims ("Love is triumphant / when Love is welcomed") then one has likewise misunderstood, since after all they are surrounded by the shimmer of doubt. Howe writes that "the obliquity of a bewildered poetry is its own theme." Yes, and the romance of self-reflexivity makes for some impressively oracular pronouncements. But when the obscuring cloak of this poetry fails to conceal its essential vacuousness, Howe's stance begins to look less like transcendent impersonality and more like a kind of alienated solipsism, a failure of articulation in which the only representable thing is private to the point of insignificance.

— Brian Phillips