Marie Howe Events
'A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.' – 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Jury
American poet Marie Howe's poetry was published for the first time in the UK and Ireland in November 2024 in her Bloodaxe Books retrospective What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems. The book was first published in the US by W.W. Norton & Company in July 2024 as New and Selected Poems, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2025.
What the Earth Seemed to Say brings together more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America’s most daring and courageous poets, and opens with twenty new poems. This retrospective draws from each of her four collections – including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss. 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).
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Sunday 15th March, 10:00 – 11:00
StAnza Poetry Festival 2026, St Andrews, Scotland
Masterclass with Marie Howe: No, Not, Nothing, Never: Correction, Contradiction, Negative Capability and The Bliss of Uncertainty
Byre: Auditorium | £20/£15/£10/£5
In this masterclass, Pulitzer Prize winner Marie Howe explores poems that appear to think on the page. You’ll study works where the poet contradicts themselves, corrects themselves, admits what they do not know, stops, then starts again before experimenting with contradiction in your own poems.
Book here.
Sunday 15th March, 18.30 – 20:15
StAnza Poetry Festival 2026, St Andrews, Scotland
Poetry Centre Stage: Marie Howe & Sarah Howe
Byre: Auditorium | £20/£15/£10/£5
Pulitzer Prize winner Marie Howe and T. S. Eliot Prize winner Sarah Howe read from bodies of work which have been praised for fierce clarity and emotional power. A rare chance to hear two remarkable voices together. This event is dedicated to the memory of StAnza founder, Brian Johnstone.
Book here for in-person tickets and here for online.
PAST EVENTS AND RECORDINGS
Friday 8 November 2024, 7pm GMT
Online launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine
Online launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine, celebrating the publication of our new November titles. All three poets read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
Now available on YouTube.
Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, 22 October 2022 - Marie Howe reads her poem 'The Singularity'
Marie Howe's poem 'The Singularity' performed by the poet. Part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation's Read By series of poetry films.
Directed by Matthew Thompson and filmed at Storm King Art Center.
'The Singularity' is included in the new poems section of Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024) winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2025. This retrospective is published in the UK and Ireland by Bloodaxe Books with the title What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems.
MARIE HOWE READS FROM HER COLLECTION MAGDALENE
Marie Howe: Magdalene
In her collection Magdalene (2017) Marie Howe imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve.
Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Marie Howe reading and discussing the poems of Magdalene during her visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in Herefordshire in July 2018. The poems included are: ‘Before the Beginning’, ‘On Men, Their Bodies’, ‘The Affliction’, ‘Magdalene: The Addict’, ‘The Landing’, ‘The Teacher’, ‘Magdalene – The Seven Devils’, ‘The Girl at 3’, ‘Walking Home’, ‘The Map’ and ‘One Day’. All these poems, apart from 'The Girl at 3', are included in What the Earth Seemed to Say.
[27 January 2026]
