What the Dying do
Marie Howe is one of our greatest living poets on the subject of death—and consequently, on what it means to live, as we all do, in death’s shadow.
Review by Whitney Rio-Ross
Marie Howe is dying. So am I. And unless you have made some terrible deal with a demonic force, so are you.
Usually, I am reminded of death when reading selected or collected works because they are usually published after a poet has died. This makes sense; a true “collected works” would include everything—the popular, the unremarkable, perhaps even the unpublished if a family member stumbles upon some decent ones. But recently, more living poets have begun publishing books of their selected poetry. I must admit to questioning this trend. Is it a purely financial move, hoping that readers will be more likely to purchase the greatest hits in hardback for thirty to forty dollars than buy separate paperback collections priced at fifteen dollars each? (As a poet, I completely understand and in no way judge that motivation.) Is it a poet’s attempt to have some control over their legacy before they have no say? (I wonder this especially about selected works with introductions. It seems a bit like a eulogy rehearsal.) But then comes my worst fear: What if this poet is actually about to die? What if they only have a few poems left in them, and instead of publishing one more chapbook, their agent thought that a selected works with a few new poems would be more lucrative or dignified?
I have no idea what Marie Howe’s motivations were for putting together a book of selected works and twenty new poems. I hope with my whole heart that she is in excellent health and will write and publish many more poems during her lifetime. But this is a book for the dead and dying. In these pages, death isn’t a ghost haunting a handful of poems. Death is a main character who only leaves the party for an occasional smoke break.
Howe’s Selected Works even begins with death in the opening “Prologue,” which contains several lines listing the many loved ones who had died by the time Howe was “just past the middle” of her life. The second poem, “Postscript,” looks at the end of our planet due to climate change and what that means for those who come after us. The refrain is one of accountability: “What we did.” We are killers, willing agents of death. Though we might have spent our whole lives convincing ourselves otherwise, Howe accuses, “It was right / in front of you, right in front of your eyes / and you didn’t see.” The third poem, “Practicing,” begins, “Today I’m going to practice being dead for a few hours.”
For Howe, writing so much about death isn’t novel, a new obsession brought on by examining new fine lines. Death has always been one of Howe’s favorite themes and is even a presence in her first book’s religious and lyrical verse. It comes to center stage in her second book of narrative poetry, What the Living Do, which recounts the story of her brother dying from an AIDS-related illness and her grief during this period and after his death. In these poems, death is not an idea but a painful, embodied reality. The eponymous poem is addressed to Johnny after he died, and its raw voice, crisp imagery, and profound insight earns it the fame it’s garnered over the years. Though her following collection, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, steps away from this narrative and makes nowhere near as many references to death, it still appears. The way those poems weave spirituality and metaphysics through narrative and observational poetry kept me thinking of death as I read them. The eternal and temporal meet in her poems on the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and through them a quiet, lyrical death march pulses. In her latest collection, Magdalene, death is once again front and center. Her poem “October” even shows how death allows a reprieve from loneliness when the speaker realizes, “Yes I’ll die, / so will everyone, so has everyone. It’s what we have in common.”
I want people to read Marie Howe’s poetry for centuries after she has finished writing it.
There are many ways to put together a selected works book. Most I read are arranged chronologically, ending with whatever new poems the poet has written since their most recent collection. Readers see the poet grow or change. (I personally do not believe in the artistic myth of progress, that writers get consistently better over time.) Howe, however, chooses a different approach. She begins with her new poems and then goes back to her first book, moving chronologically from there. “Here I am,” she says. “And this is how I got here.” By beginning in the present with so many poems about death and aging, Howe actually reminded me that she is alive, still creating and evolving. She does these things in the face of death, but not in defiance of an impending doom. Marie Howe is a poet who writes about death as not an eventual end but an abiding fact. Of course she is creating new poems while looking back on her previous work. Of course “that yearning” she speaks of in “What the Living Do” continues as our bodies break down, because we are living and dying with every breath taken, every poem written.
And of course, our death does not mean we no longer endure. For decades, Howe has written about historical and fictional women who endure long past their deaths. Several of her poems speak in the voice of Eve and Mary, mother of Jesus. Her most recent collection is written in the voice of a contemporary Mary Magdalene. Her new poems include several about Persephone, dragged to death’s realm over and over. Her repeated death is how she remained so firmly in our collective imagination. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether any living author’s legacy will outlast them for long. Plenty of excellent writers people once described as indispensable haven’t made the canon fifty years later. I want people to read Marie Howe’s poetry for centuries after she has finished writing it. But of all the contemporary poets I read, Howe is the one who writes as someone entirely unconcerned with that question, someone truly comfortable writing in death’s presence, whatever the world might do with her work after she dies. This attitude serves her poetry. It allows each poem to embrace “that yearning,” to cherish itself. I believe Howe offers a brilliant ars poetica in “Persephone and Demeter,” one her poems live into page after page:
Like everything alive I was meant to be split open,
to blossom, to be sucked, to be eaten,
to lean, to bend, to wither,
to die and die and die until I died.
Whitney Rio-Ross is the author of the chapbook Birthmarks (Wipf & Stock) and poetry editor for Fare Forward. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Whale Road Review, EcoTheo Review, Earth & Altar, Presence Journal, SWING, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Nashville, TN, and her debut collection, thunder makes us, is forthcoming in 2026 from Belle Point Press.
New and Selected Poems was released by W.W. Norton on April 2, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
