Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

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THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Here’s the final poem, which first appeared in Poetry International: 

Homecoming

I put on my good black shoes, my shirt
of grey softness that reminds me of luck,

and the blue hat given me
by a child who left

this earth that even her shadow
made so beautiful.

And then, well, I set out
down the clamor of roads

and, almost by accident, onto paths
through dense apothecaries of evergreen and fern

and finally to meadow and orchard
risen from the dead into a contentment

that did not know me
and wouldn’t take my money or my name.

Did I not see I was the same no one
who had lived there always

and could never return?
Did I not perceive the multitudes

waving their arms like wind to be known again
and gathered like pieces of a god?

How many many years, how much spent blood,
to unpilgrim ourselves, to stand before an empty house

glistening with the grief of a happy life.

—Christopher Howell

“…and after that there must be the dancing” he writes in “Surveillance.” Or, “the dancing / and the weeping / and the feast.”

You can learn more about Christopher Howell at https://www.eou.edu/mfa/faculty/christopher-howell-poetry/, or on Wikipedia and Artist Trust. I found “A Conversation with Christopher Howell” about this particular book at https://truemag.org/2018/11/08/a-conversation-with-christopher-howell/.

 

 

Photo by Emine: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pigeons-on-person-s-hand-15010957/

Matthew Murrey, LITTLE JOY

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I’m really phoning it in today—my apologies. It’s been one of those days (2 days) with a thousand interruptions. Much of it good: carpet edge is reset; electrician has rewired for the new stove and installed the light fixture over the sink; faucet and garbage disposal going in today; appliances, soon. (It looks as though I will have a working kitchen again within 2 or 3 days, early next week at the latest.)

A month or so ago I reviewed Matthew Murrey’s book, Little Joy (from The Portage Poetry Series, Cornerstone Press, 2026) for Escape Into Life. You can read my review by following this link.

And here is one poem, to demonstrate what I mean about the delight Murrey threads through the entire book:

Shifting

I was wind and sunlight again
on the El platform as a train pulled in.

Its doors opened to a woman
with wild, gray hair and loose layers

of mismatched clothes. Without one word
she tossed a blessing of birdseed for the birds

then pigeoned back from the closing doors.
I could call her crazy, but what about you and me

shifting for ourselves in our drabs and grays that hide
our iridescent purple and green fly-away dreams?

I wish I could wear my wings on my sleeve, even as I grub
for the money that gets me the food I need and the place I sleep.

—Matthew Murrey, Little Joy

Think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its resounding end-line, “You must change your life.” Rilke closely observes a statue; Murrey, an old woman feeding birds. If you need a prompt today, take note of two or three things—unusual, maybe—that catch your attention today. Jot down some details from one, and, dwelling on it, consider what you might change about your own life in answer to its call.

Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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DRESSING IN THE DARK, Kathleen Flenniken, Lynx House Press, 2025.

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Here is one poem for you—though I could have chosen any, a whole book of new favorites.

61

I remember myself as my own child

pinned at the chest to a list of wishes.
This isn’t the way I expected her to turn out.

I confused my inside and outside,
chose to be inscribed and circumscribed.

What would it mean to embrace myself?
my hands holding hands, packages, keys.

Balance required me to concentrate
on the doorknob, the groceries.

For much of my life I wanted to feel denied—
the principle of the grapefruit diet, of Odysseus

lashed to the mast while the sirens sang.
I trained on half-price racks of turtleneck sweaters.

We speak of ambition, the chef instead of the cook,
but Mother sat at a table

writing Christmas card after Christmas card
four days running every year.

Then she made the lebkuchen, shortbread,
and fruit cake. The true listener

doesn’t distinguish inside from outside.
She counts them the same. Bird song

and whatever you still could be.

—Kathleen Flenniken

You can find five more poems from Dressing in the Dark at New World Writing Quarterly.

Kathleen was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014. Visit her website to learn more about her. Order  her books at bookshop.org or your local independent bookshop.

Sandra Yannone’s BOATS FOR WOMEN

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BOATS FOR WOMEN, Sandra Yannone, Salmon Poetry, 2019.

If you don’t know Sandra Yannone, I am here to tell you, you really should. In addition to being Poet Laureate of her hometown, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, consider this impressive list of activities from her website:

She is co-founder and host of Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry group and reading series. In addition, Sandy hosts Last Tuesdays with Sandy & Thomas, a special monthly online reading event for Olympia Poetry Network subscribers, and co-hosts the West-East Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic & Beyondonline reading series. Previous hosting and co-hosting appearances include The Collectibles Lesbian Trading Card Reading Series with Headmistress Press, and as the featured poet and collaborator on the Little Oracles: Divinations podcast miniseries.

I met up with Sandy at my June reading for Olympia Poetry Network, and we exchanged books. Her Boats for Women witnesses the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, rides along with Houdini’s wife, and dramatizes what it looks like to survive one’s own raucous and wild choices.

The title poem, a prose poem, marries marine history with personal history, capturing all the themes of the book—“Silence. Disaster. Desire. Hope. These cardinal directions…” Notice the anaphora (the repetition of a word at the beginning of clauses) of yes, yes, yes running all the way through the poem.

Boats for Women

Yes, the boat sank. Yes, it broke in two like a stereotypical
broken heart before it plummeted to depths no one could measure
until seventy years later technology caught up and looked its
ancestor in the face. Yes is the way the years oxidize the steel,
and yes wipes the name Titanic off the bow. Yes are the lifeboats,
the davits, the call for women and children first. Yes are the men
who cry from the decks. Sometimes when I kiss her, I am
leaving a yes on her lips to remind her that I will go down
with the ship. Sometimes when she whispers yes, she is staying
on board. But there is always room on the lifeboats for two
more women. Yes is the fact that if we were alive on that
night, we would have lived.

—Sandra Yannone

If you are writing a poem a day during National Poetry Month, Sandy’s “Some Talk About Rain” suggests a good prompt. (And, yes, it is raining today in the Pacific Northwest with a 100% chance of rain.) It begins: “We were in the soggy middle again and in between / she was talking about the rain, remembering / how it rained…” A few lines later: “how we would spill / wet against the bricks, sequined trails / / rushing ahead…” Are we talking about rain or about relationships or a hike, or all three? The imagery and chimed sounds (notice the plosive sounds: weT againsT the briCKs, seQuined) here, and throughout the collection suggest, definitely, the glad all of it.

To learn more about the poet, visit her website, https://www.sandrayannone.com, where you’ll also find links to her on-line events, and for purchase of her books.

Photo from PEXELS, by Mike van Schoonderwalt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/fishing-boats-on-water-5502827/