Presents a selection of poems. This book includes peoms in which the theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. It protests against the difficulty of salvation.

Contents Introduction to the World Q The Nursery Robeson Street Joy Had I Known Veteran Close Up Conclusively Goodbye, Post Office Square Lines out to Silence Poem from a Single Pallet The Vineyard In the Spirit There Are No Accidents The Sea-Garden The Quietist O'Clock Index of First Lines

"Fanny Howe's strangely hushed but busy landscape keeps leading us into it until we realize we're lost but wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This book is a strange joy."—John Ashbery"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in these poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it does."—Robert Creeley"Fanny Howe is a sly, wicked poet, always shifting between the social, the political, as well as the linguistic and literary concerns of an artist always writing from the cutting edge."—Quincy Troupe"Fanny Howe is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since Dickinson herself. These taut and sometimes witty poems are centripetal; they inscribe moments of a spiritual and psychological quest, word by packed word, image by edged image."—Albert Gelpi, Stanford University"Fanny Howe writes against the grain of language and the mind. These serial works, collected from a lifetime's steady contemplation, weave piece by piece a texture of such difficulty. Most religious poetry stands on faith, emotion, or certainty; Howe's work begins and ends with questions, and immense interiority in the shape of the physical world itself."—Norman Fischer, Co-abbot, San Francisco Zen Center"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the ‘city on a hill.’ Writes Emerson, ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.’ Here’s the luminous and incontrovertible proof." —Michael Palmer, author of The Lion Bridge