"Only artworks are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals," Susan
Howe has said. In Concordance, she has created a fresh body of work
transmitting vital signals from a variety of archives. "Since," a
semi-autobiographical prose-poem, opens the collection: concerned with
first and last things, meditating on the particular and peculiar
affinities between law and poetry, it ranges from the Permian time of
Pangea through Rembrandt and Dickinson to the dire present.
"Concordance," a collage poem originally published as a Grenfell Press
limited edition, springs from slivers of poetry and marginalia, cut from
old concordances and facsimile editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert,
Browning, Dickinson, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as from various field
guides to birds, rocks, and trees: the collages' "rotating prisms" form
the heart of the book. The final poem, "Space Permitting," is collaged
from drafts and notes Thoreau sent to Emerson and Margaret Fuller's
friends and family in Concord while on a mission to recover her remains
from the shipwreck on Fire Island. The fierce ethic of salvage in these
three very different pieces expresses the vitalism in words, sounds,
syllables, the telepathic spirit of all things singing into air.
