Obtain Immediately The Winter Sun: Notes On A Vocation Conceived By Fanny Howe Ready In Booklet

I'm not a fan of books of fragments, The subtitle 'Notes on a vocation' is quite apt these are notes,

Here is a good one, about her writing students:

", . . I do not expect them to tell except obliquely,

Because I don't tell, Dangerous memories are those that seem best left alone contrary to what we are rged so often to do.
If you speak of them they are deformed into words and become a potential conversation among strangers, They are not it. They are never it. They are not to be revisited, No matter how eloquent the description of the intimacy, violence, and fear, no matter how close the speaker is to what you are telling, the story is not it.
Better to take up translation an turn someone else's memories into a cold poem, or better to make it fiction.
True trauma has no language, "

Pretty powerful stuff, I liked early essays, on her memory of being a child living in Harvard Square in the's.
'The Winter Sun' is essay fragments about Howe's childhood, family, her spirituality, her vocation as a writer, There are parts of this book that I found more immediately compelling than others, but what made me really love this book was how in reading it, I felt like I needed to pay more attention to the things I wouldn't naturally be drawn to, in particular the fragments on Howe's religious/metaphysical explorations.
I, as the reader, felt like I should listen to Howe because I trusted her as the writer to show me things about religious philosophy that she understood intuitively/experientially that I would have been closed off to myself.
Today a woman in New Orleans thanked Jesus when she was handed a drink of water, We saw her on television,
Why did the woman thank Jesus instead of the man who brought it to her
I mean, if she thinks Jesus brought the glass of water, who brought the flood that made her thirsty
Tell me, why did the woman thank Jesus
What if you were to tell her that not only did Jesus die two thousand years ago, but he did not come back and does not exist in any possible sense today.

What if you were to tell her that she should thank the man in front of her instead and ask him his name.

What if you were to tell her that we stand alone on a planet and when she is given a glass of water, it follows from a series of causes that have made it an inevitable gesture.

And so she should thank the man, not Jesus, for the water since he was the faithful member of a chain of neighborly acts.

Or maybe this is what she meant, Just a small way in and I am in love with her use of language, She segues out of memories into spiritual musings seamlessly, I'll see where it takes me, Since I was her student in the late's, it's fascinating and

clears up a few things to read her perspectives on her students in the late's.
Not that this book is all about me or anything, It's more like Sebald writing "To The Lighthouse" after a massive religious conversion or crisis, There's no other writer who can make religious questions seem so familiar to me they aren't, and I think that's because for Fanny, conviction is its own crisis.
It's unsurprising that there are few writers like her now most citizens of this century could not write while thinking like this.
Maybe that's what the The Winter Sun's frequent evocations of past and future and conflations of the two are for: removing the influence of a present which requires conviction to be always brittle and positive.
Sometimes I didn't have the patience necessary for this book, i've long waited for this new book by fanny howe, ever since i came across a portion of one of her lyric essays published several years ago in some hoitytoity journal of scholarship, i think it was.
many reviewers are right: the linkages between this book, 'the wedding dress,' and the earlier 'lives of the spirit/glasstown: where something got broken' are readily apparent.
if you, as a reader, are willing to proceed by the poetics of bewilderment that howe herself uses in all her works.
'the winter sun' bears relation to 'the lyrics,' her most recent book of poetry, too, then again, in her work, genre categories are more useful for how she breaks them down and blurs them than for how she fortifies them.
not very interesting prose, biographic, . alot of intellectual allusions and name dropping Beautiful essays by Fanny Howe, a poet praised for her "private quest through the metaphysical universe.
. . the results are startling and honest" The New York Times Book

Fanny Howe's richly contemplative The Winter Sun is a collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America's most original contemporary poets.


Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, Howe shows the origins and requirements of "a vocation that has no name.
" She finds proof of this in the lives of othersJacques Lusseyran, who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abb Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Bront and the fifthcentury philosopher and poet Bharthari.
With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a Progress rather than a memoir.


The Winter Sun displays the same power as found in her highly praised collection of essays, The Wedding Dress, a book described by James Carroll as an "unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature.
" here: sitelink newpages. com/bookreviews/ To my surprise, I felt in sync with Fannie Howe, She made mistakes in love or the chase, She loves her children. She is still trying to make sense of her own early family life, It seems she has lately become a Catholic, But the Buddhist kind. She didn't/doesn't like school, yet she is an intellectual in spite of herself, Part of this is me too, and some I would never be, She seems honest, and I like her meandering style, which she accomplishes without wasting a word,
This confusion was at her source like the smear of chaos,

Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, She was awarded theRuth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.
S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, She was a judge for theGriffin Poetry Prize, .