LITMIR.BIZ

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.

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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 now he is in love, which is the soul�s condition, and alone because 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.

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Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting collection, Gaze, is a book of counterpoints, 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 explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled—the past living on inside us as we live inside the physical world that surrounds us—and he reminds us particularly of how loss releases us into the present, how in the process of living, “everybody pays.”Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of inner life, and finally on the «other world» of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures. Shifting between lyric and narrative poetry, the many voices come together to question and explore our perception of the world. While many similarly ambitious books unwisely set out to stake a claim on wisdom, however, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility—and thus, through their quiet and careful examinations, offer a far greater kind of wisdom.

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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.

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