Rare Books

Concordance

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Description: "'Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,' Susan Howe has stated. In Concordance, the limited edition of her new collage poems, she has created a fresh body of art, made from slivers of poetry and marginalia, snipped from concordance editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, and Dickinson as well as from facsimile editions of Coleridge, Yeats, the new Poems of T. S. Eliot, and also from various fields guides to birds, rocks, and trees. Inspired in part by the wonderful flower collages of the eighteenth-century British artist Mrs. Delany, here Howe takes up her scissors and carries further what one critic has called her 'poetic installations on the margins of the American literary wilderness.' Dipping into and snipping from such odd volumes as The Observer's Book of English Moths and The Secret Languages of Ireland, Howe here reasserts the polysemous nature of words half-spoken--and in her skimming flight transfers half-grasped meanings whole to the reader. Prefaced by the prose poem "Envoi," which meditates and puns on names, sources, and affinities ('Echo echo I love you breathe breathe'), Concordance presents a body of fiercely non-conformist poems. These works--full of transplantations and ghostly whispers, excisions and erasures, fragments of half-remembered bonds and newly felt correspondences--seem to lift off the page in 'rotating prisms.' Coursing through Concordance is an exultant, savage spirit of salvage, redeeming stories that seemingly can never be told, and yet (with the witchcraft of the omitted words somehow edging themselves back in again) making the old new and bringing--via split, treasured words--lost worlds home. Concordance, a first edition published in 2019, is printed letterpress on Somerset and Whatman in an edition of forty-six, and bound in Japanese Teachest by Claudia Cohen. The book comprises seventy pages of Howe's poems, accompanied by 'Envoi,' issued as a chapbook printed on handmade Whatman. The two books are enclosed in a slipcase made of Teachest and Satogami."--Publisher's prospectus (viewed 2019 February 6).
Type: Rare Books(Opens in new tab)
Publication date: 2018.
Call number: 647523
Creator: Howe, Susan (1937-)(Opens in new tab)
Provenance: Purchased from The Grenfell Press, May 2019. Author's signature on rear pastedown.
Dimensions: 23 cm +
Associated people: Howe, Susan, (1937-); Cohen, Claudia, (1953-)
Associated organization: Grenfell Press,
Find out more: View in the Library catalog(Opens in new tab)

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Tom Tit Tot
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"The most recent in a series of artist's books issued by the Library Council, Tom Tit Tot brings together sixty-seven poems by Susan Howe with design and artwork by R.H. Quaytman, the poet's daughter. The text is hand-printed at the Grenfell Press in New York by Brad Ewing and Leslie Miller, who designed the volume with the poet and the artist. Brett Groves, Quaytman's longtime printmaker and collaborator, worked closely with the artist to produce all of the images ... May Castleberry ... produced the book for the Museum of Modern Art"--Colophon.
647549
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Richard Howe correspondence
Manuscripts
Howe's letters to Admiral Sir Roger Curtis concerning the British Navy (administration, personnel, ships and equipment, signals and signal books); naval operations, chiefly in the Channel during the wars of the First and Second Coalitions; personal affairs of Earl Howe.
HO 213-HO 269
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Richard Howe correspondence
Manuscripts
Howe's letters to Admiral Sir Roger Curtis concerning the British Navy (administration, personnel, ships and equipment, signals and signal books); naval operations, chiefly in the Channel during the wars of the First and Second Coalitions; personal affairs of Earl Howe.
HO 69-HO 123
Image not available
Richard Howe correspondence
Manuscripts
Howe's letters to Admiral Sir Roger Curtis concerning the British Navy (administration, personnel, ships and equipment, signals and signal books); naval operations, chiefly in the Channel during the wars of the First and Second Coalitions; personal affairs of Earl Howe.
HO 124-HO 212
Image not available
Richard Howe correspondence
Manuscripts
Howe's letters to Admiral Sir Roger Curtis concerning the British Navy (administration, personnel, ships and equipment, signals and signal books); naval operations, chiefly in the Channel during the wars of the First and Second Coalitions; personal affairs of Earl Howe.
HO 1-HO 68
Image not available
Howe, Richard Earl Howe. Letter to Sir Roger Curtis
Manuscripts
Howe's letters to Admiral Sir Roger Curtis concerning the British Navy (administration, personnel, ships and equipment, signals and signal books); naval operations, chiefly in the Channel during the wars of the First and Second Coalitions; personal affairs of Earl Howe.
HO 62

Concordance

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Tom Tit Tot

Richard Howe correspondence

Richard Howe correspondence

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Richard Howe correspondence

Howe, Richard Earl Howe. Letter to Sir Roger Curtis