Christopher Howell - Böcker

In Christopher Howell’s twelfth collection of poems, his gifts for elegy, humor, and lyricism are on full display. The Grief of a Happy Life explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that happiness and grief inform one another and give our lives fullness and vitality.Arranged in four sections, Howell’s poems feature not only these concerns, but a large and various cast of characters as well. Aeneas, Saint Theresa, Ovid, Kierkegaard, a German submarine, and so much more are woven together with Howell’s trademark precision and accessibility into exquisite tableaux, each providing a view of both what we must live with and what we must not live without.

In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with:And if he remembers nowhe is in love, which is the soul’s condition, and alonebecause that is how we live."How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live?KeatsWhen Keats, at last beyond the curtainof love’s distraction, lay dying in his roomon the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the BerniniFountain “filling him like flowers,”he held his breath like a coin, looked outinto the moonlight and thought he saw snow.He did not suppose it was fever or the body’sweakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”and there he was, secretly, for the restof his improvidently short life: up to his neckin sleigh bells and the impossibly English criesof street venders, perfectand affectionate as his soul.For days the snow and statuary sang him so farbeyond regret that if now you walk rancorlessand alone there, in the piazza, the white shadowof his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”may enter you.

This generous volume of new and selected poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a storyteller’s informality. It also shows the development of his signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in poems “connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details.”These are poems of palpable force. Howell thinks out loud as he works his way through what charms, challenges, and defines the human project. He questions, tests images and associations, and leaps, trusting himself, into midair. In consequence, the cerebral energy propels his poems beyond statement and into startlingly evocative modes, grappling with and sifting profound matters of memory, imagination, and grief, tempered always by joy.

The counterpointed and imagistic work collected in Gaze reveals a poet uniquely concerned with the idea of vision: how the objective world (the world of time and memory), the world of the inner life, and the other world (the world of imagination and alternate life) may be seen, and how the experience of this seeing may alter itself and create meaning. Each of the book's three sections examines one of these categories of seeing, moving between narrative and lyric modes, between the undisguised voice of the poet and the voices of a variety of characters, creatures, and ghosts. Swinging between moments of delicate connection (touching a girl's wrist) and striking brutality (a boy slamming a just-caught fish against a boat's stern to kill it "as he was taught"), Howell turns these modes of vision in on each other, and the result is a collection wholly unified and unlike anything come before.

From celebrated poet Christopher Howell, Love's Last Number is a series of musings on time's arrow: on both the relentless march that divides each moment into past, present, and future -- before and after -- and the ultimately porous and recursive nature of time itself. A soldier remembers limes and curious children in Portugal. Refugees cross a dangerous land, and find each other in love. Boy scouts play war in devastating ways, a child listens to a baseball game in a more innocent time. In this multiplicity of voices and tones, the collection reflects on what we, as humans, do about memory, love, grief, war, and the search for meaning. In its sinuous sequences, Love's Last Number insists that life -- and history -- are a continuing crisis of faith, imagination, consciousness, and moral clarity. And yet these poems, like existence itself, offer moments of transcendent joy and sudden hilarity: laughter against the darkness.