Christopher Howell’s first book after the publication of “Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected,” in 2010, does not disappoint. Howell, born in 1946, shows no signs of flagging, as mature poets often do.
“Gaze” mixes memory and mortality, the inner life with the outer world seen with a Vermeer-like clarity.
The Spokane poet and teacher at Eastern Washington University has experienced much — including the crucibles of Viet Nam and the loss of his gifted daughter, Emma, in 2001.
A Howell poem can trot along — it might be a standard, poetic narrative of family, people or place — and then suddenly break out into a realm of gold. Here’s a line from the title poem that would turn any poet pea green with envy: “My mother walks through wind/to the clothesline/and I am happily no one/I need to know/trotting up the path.”
Those two lines, “and I am happily no one/I need to know” might be the very definition of childhood bliss.
Here, in a few lines, Howell sculpts his mother in the world: “Birdsong birdsong birdsong spills/from the lilacs my mother once/placed at an edge of the world/she wanted, precisely.”
Another memory poem, “Brothers Find Each Other in the Dark,” about two brothers at the circus, opens with, “The sleep of likeness brings these brothers on,” and, as they experience the surreal scene, ends with: “They find the world/far stranger than they knew, but comforting. A song they used to/sing/drifts to them exactly like a thing that isn’t there.”
Other poems are comic with a puckish sense of the absurd. One begins: “Jesus and Buddha lean above a checker board.” The ending rings true.
Recurring throughout the book is the presence of absence: “I open my window/and smell the rain/still two months away/or the rain on my shoulders/when I was a boy/or the rain in my daughter’s hair.”
People who speak of “closure” or “compartmentalizing” in the wake of tragedy should be…well, fill in the blank. Let the poet speak in “I Wake Again:” “Then I woke again and she was that distant nameless thing,/a waterfall or mountain,/perhaps a shaft of light on one of these.” The poem concludes: “I woke again and again in the strangely empty house.”
“Gaze,” by Christopher Howell, Milkweed Editions, $16 paperback.
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