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...
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...
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...
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....
