SOURCE: Nicholls, Peter. “‘The Pastness of Landscape’: Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow.” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 3 (fall 2002): 441-60.

In the following essay, Nicholls discusses the wide-ranging references and connections that occur in Howe's Pierce-Arrow and provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the poem.

It is appropriate that the first word of this “profound memory poem,” as Marjorie Perloff calls it, should be “constellations,” since the word's astrological connotations combine ideas of divination and destiny, of knowledge and inscrutability, which are deep-moving forces in Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow.¹ As so often with Howe's work, the spatial implications of, say, a constellation seem to provide a better model for a poem which, especially in its first two main sections, exhibits a startling multifariousness of theme and allusion. At the same time, Pierce-Arrow recalls us to Howe's persistent concern with the opacities of personal and historical memory, but it does so by thematizing the...