SOURCE: Green, Fiona. “‘Plainly on the Other Side’: Susan Howe's Recover.” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 1 (spring 2001): 78-101.

In the following essay, Green investigates the influence of Howe's father, Mark De Wolfe Howe, on her poetry.

Let us consider letters,” proposes Virginia Woolf (79). A mishearing of this invitation would aptly encapsulate a general truth about epistolarity: that in their responses to one another, “letters” do, indeed, “consider letters.” Thus forming a closed circuit which comes between their senders and recipients, letters reinforce the distance that they may also seem to bridge. Woolf goes on: “when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated—speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.” In every postal transaction something goes astray, the phantom hand that comes in the mail registering loss in its own miraculous survival: “speech attempted” denotes this waylaying of presence in transmission. In these...