Gaze - by Christopher Howell (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE

Christopher Howell's haunted and haunting Gaze is a collection of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we live in the physical world around us, and he reminds us 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 the 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, coming together to question and explore our perception of the world. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility, offering a bewitching and deeply felt wisdom.

From the Back Cover

PRAISE FOR GAZE

"The word gaze works two sides of the street. The book, Gaze, works those two sides, their common surface, the underside of that surface, and the liminal space in between. There is almost no contemporary poetry I can think of capable of taking me where Howell's poetry takes me: not on a journey of distance but of perspective. These poems contain the essence of poetry, rational thought subverted into an exquisite and unexpected new logic. In this collection, Howell refreshes the archetypes of home, family, country, and soul, imbuing them with twenty-first century pleasures, dangers, and complexities. Orphic, Miltonic, Rilkean, Howell is the poet I turn to when poetry eludes me, when I cannot remember my dreams, when I fail to love our human frailties."
--Kathy Fagan, author of Lip and Moving & St Rage

"In his extraordinary new book, Christopher Howell uses, among others, the motif of the traveler to investigate the imaginative terrain where the afterlife, the other life, and the inner life find a singular life. What a range of emotions, and what a rightness of tone he can work into a poem. There is an honest ease in his voice and a clarity in his gaze that allows him to range through human time, from the freshness of childhood to the thrills and fears of adolescence to the recognitions of age and loss, playful, melancholic, elegiac and stoic by turns. He blends the ordinary and the fabulous the way a great guitar player bends and stretches a note without missing a beat."
--Greg Pape, author of American Flamingo and Sunflower Facing the Sun

PRAISE FOR CHRISTOPHER HOWELL

"Christopher Howell's books are at eye-level on my nearest shelf, so I can reach them when poems are wanted to bring the soul to in its own silvery light where it often wakes weeping and trembling."
--Michael Heffernan, author of The Night Breeze Off The Ocean

"An exceptional voice and talent, one that enriches all of us writing and reading poetry in these times."
--Christopher Buckley, author ofWhite Shirt and Rolling the Bones

Christopher Howell is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (2010). Howell teaches at Eastern Washington University and lives in Spokane.

Cover design: Hopkins/Baumann
Cover art: David Luckert

Review Quotes

FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE

"For nearly four decades Christopher Howell has so ably been marrying the miraculous to the mundane; the invisible world to the here-before-our-eyes; the wacky to the expectable; the meditative to the pratfall-prone; the immediate to the ghost-ridden; and the mirthful to the elegiac--and marrying them with authority."
--Albert Goldbarth, author of Saving Lives

Gaze leads its reader through a concatenation of perspectives to a simultaneously mournful and hopeful place. It leaves us with that indescribable feeling of interconnectedness that sometimes emerges from great literature wherein the particular, deeply meditated upon, expands into the universal and makes us more than ourselves.
--Ryan Siemers, Quarterly West

These are beautiful crow-lit lyric poems singed with memory, delivered in an off-hand minor chord, touched by the surreal and the small, that manages to distill loss and still deliver a fierce joy.
--Mark Wagenaar, 32poems