Pierce-Arrow by Susan Howe

Pierce-Arrow, Susan Howe’s newest book of poems, takes as its point of departure the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishment yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing. Through Peirce and his wife Juliette, a lady of shadowy antecedents, Howe creates an intriguing nexus that explores the darker, melancholy sides of the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American intelligentsia. George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, are among those who also find a place in the three long poem-sequences that comprise the book. Howe’s historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. “It’s the blanks and gaps,” she says, “that to me actually represent what poetry is―the connections between seemingly unconnected things―as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not.”