Souls of the Labadie tract
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Souls of the Labadie tract
(A New Directions paperbook, 1089)
New Directions Books, 2007
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Souls of the Labadie Tract finds Susan Howe exploring (or unsettling) one of her favorite domains, the psychic past of America, with Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens as her presiding tutelary geniuses. Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland, in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls, Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and scraps of material. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress that ends the book. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction:
There it is there it is-you
want the great wicked city
Oh I wouldn't I wouldn't
It's not only that you're not
It's what wills and will not.
by "Nielsen BookData"