Barbara Howes' "Looking Up at Leaves" Barbara

¶ … Barbara Howes' "Looking Up at Leaves" Barbara Howes, who died in 1996, is too little read at present, yet she remains an exquisite lyric poet. One understands why Louise Bogan once judged Howes "the most accomplished woman poet of the younger generation - one who has found her own voice, chosen her own material, and worked out her own form" (qtd. from Louise Bogan Quotes -- The Quotation Page 2003). Howes wrote in one of the oddest but most important traditions of American poetry.

Howes stands with Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and ultimately Emily Dickinson in a lineage of women writers passionately committed to the independence and singularity of the poetic imagination. (To this group one might also add Louise Bogan, Julia Randall, May Swenson, and Josephine Miles). They form an eccentric but eminent sorority. In most ways they are modest, even self-deprecating writers, but, in matters they deem important, they are bold and self-assured. They are also quirky writers - alternately erudite and innocent, intimate and reserved, humorous and wistful.

They are all temperamentally private artists, but their introspective genius expresses itself matter-of-factly in everyday, even domestic, images. Perhaps what unifies them most obviously is the affirmative quality of their vision. Several of these poets have been linked by the idea that they seem to seek or find what women most desire: being at home in the world. It is precisely this ability to accept the world as it is that separates them from other, usually more popular women poets who long for some sort of spiritual or personal transformation.

Simile in "Looking Up at Leaves" Howes' vision is essentially metaphysical in that it characteristically investigates the relation of the spirit to the senses. "Looking Up at Leaves" focuses on experiencing the natural world and understanding her modest place in it through these experiences. The poem starts as a swirl of particularized images: " .. looking up at the leaves .. On the way to the sky .. This great trunk .. " (1-4).

Observation is piled on observation, image on image, as the syntax flows from line to line with few or no full stops, until at last the poem comes suddenly together in one final visionary moment that links the poet with her world: "Balanced between reflection and reflection" (13). The complex syntax is therefore not an eccentricity of style. It is an essential formal device, a dynamic means of communicating the epiphany the poem describes. The syntax does not embellish the central visionary experience; it recreates and validates it.

"Looking Up at Leaves" is more openly personal than Howes' brilliantly contrived early pieces. Her characteristic tone is quiet and affirmative, in which she carefully leads the reader into a surprisingly extended simile that resolves itself in a haunting final line: No one need feel alone looking up at leaves. There are such depths to them, withdrawal, welcome, A fragile tumult on the way to sky. This great trunk holds apart two hemispheres We lie between.

Like water lilies Leaves fall, rise, waver, echoing On their blue pool, whispering under the sun; While in this shade, under our hands the brown Tough roots seek down, lily roots searching Down through their pool of earth to an equal depth. Constant as water lilies we lie still, Our breathing like the lapping of pond water, Balanced between reflection and reflection. This poem illustrates Howes' particular lyric gift. She carefully leads the reader through a complex, extensive simile.

The leaves seem like water lilies, which, in turn, makes the sky into a blue pond: "Like water lilies / Leaves fall, rise, waver, echoing / On their blue pool, whispering under the sun" (5-7). The tree branches become roots seeking the depth of the sky like soil. And so on. The sheer length of the simile takes the reader by.