Rawaho: The Completed Poems

Rawaho: outsider, foreigner. In the poet's words: "Many uncollected pieces served as preparatory studies for these 150 titles. Since my first tentative airing of the early drafts in 1991 there have been regular staging posts, in 2001 and 2011 respectively-the latter (The Incomplete Poems) with a note from Brian Turner: "When David Howard calls his work 'incomplete' he is, I think, reminding us that just about everything, not just poems, is work in progress; hence 'incomplete'." And that still seems true, or at least no less true than it seemed then. What has changed with age ("decades destroy / your eye's glister") is my ability to hold indefinitely the weight of inchoate drafts. This book has thousands of lines but in making it I am drawing one line. Another decade has gone, I'm done. This is the best I can do." Kapka Kassabova has written: "Howard's greatest lyrical power is in apprehending the elusive. His is a poetry of the vanishing, of the shifting elsewhere, of loss lurking within the moment . . . the cerebral blends with the visceral with a brilliant lightness of touch."