What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems by Marie Howe
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2025
What the Earth Seemed to Say gathers together more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America’s most daring and courageous poets.
With its ‘radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions’ (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of her four previous collections – including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss – and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is ‘a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy’ (Dorianne Laux).
What the Earth Seemed to Say was first published in the US by W.W. Norton as Marie Howe's New & Selected Poems, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Published by Bloodaxe books 21st November 2024.
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