Talking Cures

Richard Howard's title for his new collection of poems is the old name for psychoanalysis, an allusion to the therapeutic powers of speech under controlled circumstances. For the most part, these poems are spoken out of a solitude and into a solitude, but passing through a company of some order, some chaos. A number of the poet's ecphrastic studies appear in Talking Cures, including an ecphrastic variation: five poems spoken by early 20th-century masters about movies they have seen -- in certain cases from the Other Side -- and regarded with varying suspicion. Read Henry James on Now Voyager, Joseph Conrad on Lost Horizon, George Meredith on Woman of the Year, Rudyard Kipling on King Kong, and Willa Cather on Queen Christina. (Ecphrastic poetry requires the viewer/poet to enter into the spirit and feeling of the subject through a variety of poetic stances: describing, noting, reflecting, or addressing.) Several poems concern our relations with dogs -- commercial, affective, and in the case of Freud, to round off the psychoanalytic theme, tragic. Yet a comic atmosphere pervades, though it is not certain to what degree the laughter is a comfort, the wit a solace. It is to be hoped, finally, that the streets falls on the second word of the title.