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Open Books: Events
May 07, 2010 07:30 PM
CHRISTOPHER HOWELL
The tenth volume in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds and published by the University of Washington Press, Christopher Howell's Dreamless and Possible: New and Selected Poems ($24.95) is a rich and welcome gathering from over three decades of fine work. Howell is a poet capable of remarkable articulation, and what he articulates is humanness, hurt and comfort, joy and, most movingly, grief. He writes as a parent who has lost a child, a sailor who came back from war, a man with a searching mind and an open heart -- "Some of those I love have left the world. // If the sun continues and the blue sky burns / and the sea reaches into itself almost lazily / for food and the arithmetic of what looks like / grace (until it kills you), what use my grieving / hope? Something blue-black soughs in me / like a storm of ancient invitation and regard." His language is clear and quietly stunning whether his imagery is dream-like and surreal or startlingly familiar, such as climbing roses "spreading their elegant wrists across the field," or dogs playing "with the vacancy / of the vacant lot across the street." His poetry is art's translation of what "bewilders and blesses us."
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