What the Earth Seemed to Say

What the Earth Seemed to Saygathers together more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America's most daring and courageous poets. With its 'radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions' (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe's poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of her four previous collections including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting chronicle of personal loss and contains 20 new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is 'a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy' (Dorianne Laux).

What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems by Marie Howe is a compelling compendium of the poet’s piercingly steady gaze at the painful truths of our lives with poems rich in forthright lyric insight.

There is a remarkable evenness of tone in the American poet, Marie Howe’s, What the Earth Seemed to Say, which is Howe’s first book in the UK but her fifth overall. […] Howe’s gifts with narrative, with a kind of reportage, if you like, means that the psychological narrative comes across more clearly.

What the Earth Seemed to Say is a substantial selection of work, ranging from The Good Thief, published in the 1980s, to a group of recent poems from 2023. Howe is a writer well known for exploring Christian themes from innovative modern-dress perspectives, as in her 2017 collection Magdalene.

Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.

Marie Howe’s poems are remarkable for their focused, intense, and haunting lyricism. Her poems characteristically unfold through a series of luminous particulars that gather emotional power as they delve into the complexities of the human heart. Her poems are acclaimed for writing through loss with verve, but they also find the miraculous in the ordinary and transform quotidian incidents into enduring revelation.

Each book of Marie Howe’s is a singular accomplishment, but none is as wildly alive as this.… Howe sweeps up a life and fixes it on the page, and stands here before us, the stunned and grateful witness of all that’s taken and granted by love and time.

Marie Howe is the author of five books of poetry. Her retrospective, What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), draws on four collections published in the US: Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award;The Kingdom of Ordinary Time(W.W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for theLos Angeles Times Book Prize;What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series.What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Marie Howe's brother John, who died from AIDS in 1989. Stanley Kunitz selected her for a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1988. Her other awards include grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the first Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014, and is poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City. She has taught at Tufts University and Dartmouth College, among other institutions. In 2018 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.

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