---
product_id: 4480230
title: "What the Living Do: Poems"
brand: "marie howe"
price: "₨614"
currency: SCR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.sc/products/4480230-what-the-living-do-poems
store_origin: SC
region: Seychelles
---

# What the Living Do: Poems

**Brand:** marie howe
**Price:** ₨614
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** What the Living Do: Poems by marie howe
- **How much does it cost?** ₨614 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sc](https://www.desertcart.sc/products/4480230-what-the-living-do-poems)

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- marie howe enthusiasts

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- Trusted marie howe brand quality
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## Description

What the Living Do: Poems

## Images

![What the Living Do: Poems - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31m-Lb+X12L.jpg)
![What the Living Do: Poems - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31+uaHZAlXL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Beautiful Collection Dealing with Loss, Love, Impermanence, and Living in Spite of it All!
  

*by T***T on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 11, 2018*

In What the Living Do, Marie Howe eloquently deals with the deeply emotional impact of incest and death on her life from childhood to adulthood. This very personal collection of loosely structured poems explores loss, memory, love, and transitory individual identity.  The first section touches on the traumas of Howe’s childhood. In “Sixth Grade” the reader can feel young Marie’s palpable fear as the neighborhood boys tie her and a friend to a garage door and torture them, providing one of many negative male experiences in her young life. Howe’s, “The Mother,” depicts a tragic scene of an inactive mother observing her drunken, abusive husband ascending the stairs to his daughter’s bedroom. This is followed by the “soft drone of her daughter’s waking/ voice reasoning and rising,/ and the first slap.” Howe paints a bleak picture of an immobile household knowledgeable and frozen, listening without intervening.  The second section allows readers to share an adult Howe’s pain as she witnesses her brother John’s death from AIDS. Howe offers a glimpse of moments of appreciating life despite death’s immediacy in “A Certain Light.” She writes, “so wakened that late night in one of those still/ blue moments/ that were a kind of paradise,/ he finally opened his/ eyes wide,/ and the room filled with a certain light we thought/ we’d never see again.” In “The Gate” and “One of the Last Days,” Howe and John face his death and the negation of love that accompanies it.  The final section eloquently translates Howe’s further grief and feelings of loss over the separation from her husband, her sister’s death from cancer, and the death of another friend from AIDS. Howe struggles to find her identity amidst her loss and struggle with the impermanence of life. However, in “The New Life,” her marriage is reborn, and she understands the importance of living in the moment. The title poem, “What the Living Do,” is Howe’s celebration of this impermanence and the constant “yearning” which is always part of the living. As Howe catches a reflection of herself in a window, she pauses and reflects, “I am living, I remember you.” Although the weight of death is almost crushing in this collection, Howe is still living and finding herself.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    "Gripped by a cherishing"
  

*by M***D on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2014*

In the poem "What The Living Do," Howe writes: "I'm gripped by a cherishing/so deep/for my own blowing hair, chapped face,and unbuttoned coat that I'm/speechless:/I am living, I remember you." Though these lines appear on the penultimate page of the book, they might as well function as a sort of spiritual and artistic thesis statement for its entirety. There is something exquisite in almost every poem here.As in her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Howe rescues the sacred trapped in the husk of the profane. The collection reads almost like a novella, as repeating and subsequently familiar "characters" appear in dreams and doorways, talk in italics, die after painful illness, leave her and return.Howe's poetry is at its strongest when she allows her imagery to do much of the meaningful heavy lifting. Luckily, she's at her best quite a lot here as in "Reunion," which "tells" about Howe's partner coming back to her after a separation. But Howe is too great to just tell, and so we get this: "The very best part was rowing out onto the small lake.../the long sigh of the line through the air,//and the far plunk of the hook and the sinker-/lily pads, yellow flowers//the dripping of the oars/and the knock and creak of them moving in the rusty locks." Howe knows that when there is so much to say, it's best to say little and show the beauty she's after through close attention to concrete detail.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    I needed this book more than I knew
  

*by A***H on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 10, 2021*

I lost my brother in 2017 and two writer friends told me I needed to read this book. I'm so grateful for the recommendation. I love the author's language and honesty. Her rendering of this relationship made me feel seen.

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*Product available on Desertcart Seychelles*
*Store origin: SC*
*Last updated: 2026-01-31*