Marie Howe: Magdalene

Marie Howe is one of American poetry’s most original and truly visionary voices. Her most recent collection, Magdalene, imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Alicia Ostriker says of the book: ‘Marie Howe is among our most gifted poets of trauma and healing, and of where the everyday encounters the world of the sacred. In Magdalene, Howe raises the ante. She now channels the “woman taken in adultery” of New Testament legend, and she is also her questing self, lover and mother, risen to the exaltation of the possible.’ And Mark Doty writes, ‘Each book of Marie Howe’s is a singular accomplishment, but none is as wildly alive as this. How does she see with such devastating clarity? Or allow so much of “what the living do” onto the page: avoidance, longing, tenderness, resentment and desire? What makes the engine go? The wry, knowing, seeking voice of Mary Magdalene, worn like the most transparent of masks. The experience of mothering a daughter, a long arc of love building its house in the years. Howe sweeps up a life and fixes it on the page, and stands here before us, the stunned and grateful witness of all that’s taken and granted by love and time.’ Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Marie Howe reading and discussing the poems of Magdalene during her visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in Herefordshire in July 2018. The poems included are: ‘Before the Beginning’, ‘On Men, Their Bodies’, ‘The Affliction’, ‘Magdalene: The Addict’, ‘The Landing’, ‘The Teacher’ (‘When Moses pleased…), ‘Magdalene – The Seven Devils’, ‘The Girl at 3’, ‘Walking Home’, ‘The Map’ and ‘One Day’. Magdalene is published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Thanks are also due to Adam and Nelly Munthe, Marie’s hosts during the festival, for allowing us to film Marie at Hellens, and to Chloe Garner, director of Ledbury Poetry Festival. The video was edited by Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, who has included Marie’s poems in Bloodaxe’s world poetry anthologies, including Being Alive, Being Human and Soul Food.