The Good Thief - Marie Howe

The Good Thief
Persea Books, 1988

poems

Selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.

Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.

"Marie Howe's poetry doesn't fool around. Reading it you feel interest always, delight often, and occasionally that cool wind at the back of the neck that makes you think there's one more person in the room than there actually is. These poems are intensely felt, sparely expressed, and difficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots." Margaret Atwood

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"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. Whether she is conforting the joys or terrors of existence, the light that falls on the page is suffused with grace and charity. In essence she is a religious poet, that rarity among writers of her generation." Stanley Kunitz

reviews

"Howe's debut, The Good Thief, contains a poem, "Part of Eve's Discussion", which remains one of the most breathtaking out-of-body experiences in contemporary poetry: "...when it occurs to you / your car could spin/.../ it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only / all the time." When I teach poetry classes, this is what I start with: it makes young poets want to write."
Starred Review for The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Publishers Weekly, Brenda Shaughnessy

"Howe's haunting lyricism lifts the back shades on the familial and the mythic in poems that bespeak a hard-earned compassion amid the world's chaffing."
The Boston Phoenix

"[Howe] has stolen from domesticity not only the trappings of mysticism but the wisdom of experience.
The Partisan Review