SOURCE: A review of Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1979, in Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 1997, p. 25.

In the following review, the critic offers a favorable assessment of Frame Structures.

On a visit to the zoo in December 1941, Susan Howe, then aged four, noticed that the polar bears were restless. “Animals sense something about ruin,” her father explained; returning home, they heard the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This anecdote, which opens Howe's introduction to Frame Structures, presages her poetic: personal history is set against the backdrop of large-scale upheaval, and apparent coincidences acquire the gravity of casual relations.

The four small-press works collected in Frame Structures “cross … from one field of force to another field of force,” with Marcel Duchamp, Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century surveyor William Byrd among diverse motive impulses. The poems also trace Howe's dual inheritance: Cabbage Gardens pays homage to her mother's Ireland, and Secret...