Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. —rob mclennan
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In Overlays, Sean Howard employs experimental, magpie strategies that draw fresh poems from the deep wells of two related texts—John Thompson’s influential poetry collection Stilt Jack (1978) and Peter Sanger’s Sea Run (2023), a critical commentary on Thompson’s mesmerically allusive and elusive ghazals. By mixing images and diction from these source texts with his own reserve of memories, dreams and associations, Howard opens a fresh, lucidly turbulent correspondence between literary elements, the shapes, sounds and silences of his poems creating a palimpsest score.
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The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics.
–rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog
