Fanny Howe’s is a poetry of processes rather than conclusions. It is concerned with the struggle to see without pretending that it can see very clearly or for very long. At first, Gone is overwhelming; it is lengthy and mostly composed of very short poems arranged in titled sections. A kind of narrative is implied over the course of the sections, but the events to which it refers are often unclear. The speaker reports from a visionary landscape in which everything seen is a figure, a vessel for meaning used to transport something back. And we are left to do a good deal of the work. Howe raises questions to which she does not purport to have the answers. Gone is an unusually collaborative book in which we are often made to augment the matter of the poems.
          The second section is a prose piece entitled "Doubt," which was selected by Robert Hass for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2001. It is an essay or a prose poem or, more accurately, a poetic essay, and it moves with the same force of association and urgency as the poems. In the several page meditation on Simone Weil who, "as much as Woolf and Stein, sought salvation in a choice of words," Howe leaps through a discourse on faith and the role that language plays in our reckoning with it. Despite the fact that "multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary," doubt, which is "the physical double to belief" and "the invisible engine behind every step taken," is, for Howe, our greatest asset. She defines the poet as one who "act[s] out the problem" of "why everyone doesn’t kill everyone else, including themselves, since they can," in words. The piece enacts its subject matter; rather than make proclamations, Howe chooses to ask questions. She almost concludes, "You have to make yourself believe," but follows immediately with "Is this possible?" She asks "can you call ‘doubt’ ‘bewilderment’ and suddenly be relieved?" The answer, at last, is no. We are left with "the dream of having no doubt," as both a burden and a guide. The essay also functions as a kind of key to the rest of the book. Howe, intentionally or not, is teaching us how to read her work; we must approach these poems with the desire for conclusiveness without any expectation of conclusions.
          In "No Light," Howe figures what might be the place from which the poems speak as "…the crux/of this huddle." They are always extraordinarily intimate, wound tightly around the consciousness of their speaker. A poem from early in the book’s first sequence illustrates and comments on the way in which revelation occurs:

(Skin is what I she and they see when we see feelings)
Not I but a she-shaped one

over fluid frame

sized to capture what comes in

agony that heaven doesn’t begin

(to know the soul imprinting is in pain)

How are we to make meaning of this? It seems, at first glance, to be missing crucial details, but this is where Howe asks for our contribution. What is the difference between this "I she and they" and "we?" The self is deftly divided here into more than one consciousness. Its parts are in conflict, some seeing "skin" when others see "feelings," but they are not quite separate, as suggested by the lack of punctuation. The consciousness that sees "feelings" seems to win out in this instance, however, because it "…know[s] the soul [is] imprinting," which is to say it "…capture[s] what comes in." This is what Howe asks of us, to be proactive in our reading of her poems, even if we are left uncertain.
          Howe demonstrates what she can do with a longer poem in part VIII of the section entitled "The Passion." While she has mastered the art of wringing a great deal of resonance from a few words, with more breath (and breadth), Howe is able to slowly set a scene and then refigure it. She begins:

In this grove there is only one patient. His heart like a berry
bleeds an aura onto ice-white sheets, his eyes glassy, his chest
cold. Even his tongue is cold.

He has eaten so much meat the beasts feel an affinity
and lick him where his heart is spilling. His eyes are lifted.

Nobody knows she is following him but he has left the light
on for her. She follows the imprint of his womanly feet.

A strange kind of time passes between the moment we find out "His heart like a berry/ bleeds," and when "His eyes are lifted." The narrative stretches into the past and future from the point in time we are watching. As new information is revealed, the previous parts of the poem are recast in light of it. Later, we find out "He has a thorn/ on his brow as if he’s a unicorn or Cain the woundable one." The character takes on new mythic value with every added word. The poems, even the short ones, revise themselves as if the consciousness that speaks them is ever growing more aware of the meaning of what it observes.
          In Gone, along with Dickinson’s brevity and her close vision of the world as an intimate mirror for the self, we also hear Whitman who, in "Song of Myself," says, "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Gone is a melding of the influences of these two figures. Howe leans far more toward Dickinson’s skepticism, but her engine is Whitman’s constant self-revision. This is a book of questions artfully unraveled. Howe offers no easily apprehended stylistic tricks. There is, however, a profound experience to be had in these pages, accessed by revising one’s impressions again and again.