Poetic Memory: The Forgotten Self in Plath, Howe, Hinsey, and Glück. Uta Gosmann. Madison, New Jersey and Lanham, Maryland:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.  242 pp.

In Poetic Memory: The Forgotten Self in Plath, Howe, Hinsey, and Glück, Uta Gosmann focuses on the ways these four poets make use of “poetic memory,” which she associates to Plotinus's concept of the soul, an entity that possesses more than earthly knowledge. Gosmann compares the poets’ use of poetic memory to the perhaps more culturally apprehensible “historic memory” (which she traces to Plutarch's idea of narrative in identity formation), and she defines her terms (“historic” and “poetic” memory) this way: “What I call ‘historic memory’ presupposes that the self is constituted by the conscious, recollect-able experiences of the past” (p. 1). Further:

Poetic memory, in contrast, posits that the self is more than the compound of a person's remembered biography. Poetic memory does not depend on the accuracy, linearity, causality, or coherence of historic memory, and it reaches beyond the accountable facts of a life toward the notion of a self that is dynamic, expansive, and full of potential. (p. 1)

In essence, the poets Gosmann treats construct poems that subvert the linear, historic narrative, for “[t]hey share an intuitive certainty of self as being other and as being that which eludes historic memory … They use words, which are complex bits of memory, to push against encrusted structures … of the mind