Love's Last Number: Poems

by Christopher Howell

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE UNT RILKE PRIZE

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. In a multiplicity of voices and tones, Love’s Last Number reflects on what we do about memory, love, grief, war, and the contradictions implicit in the human search for meaning. At once profoundly intimate and ambitiously broad in scope, this collection explores the place of individual losses and joys in the context of greater historical tragedy and triumph.

In its sinuous sequences, Love’s Last Number insists that life—and history—are a continuing crisis of faith, imagination, consciousness, and moral clarity. And yet these poems, like existence itself, offer moments of transcendent joy and sudden, inexplicable hilarity: laughter against the darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314758
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	02/14/2017
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems. He teaches at Eastern Washington University, where he is also director of Willow Springs Books, and director and principal editor for Lynx House Press. He lives in Spokane, WA.

Table of Contents

1 The Agnostic Pirouettes

A Short Song 3

Desperately Composed 4

Crossing Jordan 6

But before That 8

Connectivity 9

Diminishing Returns 11

The Body in Motion 12

Kansas 13

This Mortal Coil

On the Nature of Things 14

The After Hours Afterlife 15

The Parable as Originally Told 16

I'm Not Sure about Dying 17

Edward Hopper 18

Astronomy Lesson 19

Saving Face 21

Tiny Bees Clung to Us 22

Out of Sequence 23

Two Poems in Which He Thinks of Her 26

The Principal Uncertainty 28

An As-Though Prayer 30

2 The Wrong Angels

Village 35

Tin Soldiers 37

I Said to God, "I'm Thinking of You" 38

The Wrong Angels

Edvard Munch 39

A Tense Shift Addresses the Imagination 40

Goodbye to All That 42

I Thought 44

War of the Worlds 45

Saint Second Amendment 47

In This Photograph Baron von Richthofen 48

Meltdown 50

The Angel of Mars: Two Views 51

Scouts Honor 54

Reflection upon Psalm 121 56

Anchors Aweigh

Tag 57

Religious Experience 59

Limes 61

Night Watch 63

Lifeboat Dream 64

If the Moon Kept Goats: A Veteran's Tale 66

The Situation 68

Two Endings 69

3 The Unattainable Now

Two Birds 73

The Limits of Mercy 75

My Youth 76

He Speaks to the Muse 78

The Nothing That Is

Ghosts 79

Author, Author 80

Your Brother's Face 82

A Man in the Park 83

Masefield in Purgatory 84

Second Message 86

Abide with Me 88

Is Time the Road or What Travels along It? 89

A Willow Life 91

Falling 93

The Body at Rest 95

Biography 96

Take Me out to the Ball Game 98

In the House of the Afterlife 99

Memory's Daybook 100

Voice 103

A Last Walk in the Quabbin 104

Love's Last Number 106

Step by Step 108

Wyoming 110

Acknowledgments 111

Editorial Reviews

02/06/2017
In his 11th collection, Howell (Gaze) gathers varied reflections on time and the passage of existence—murky concepts that he addresses in a dissatisfying and haphazard way. What the poems seem to be reaching for, and not quite attaining, is grace and poignancy reflected in the mundane. Instead, a triteness echoes back from hollow lines, when, for example, Howell focuses a poem on the cliché of a childhood dog going to live on a euphemistic “farm.” The collection brandishes a frustrating randomness, somewhat encapsulated by these similarly slapdash lines from “This Mortal Coil”: “a man with no arms/ finds a railroad spike and a hunk of cheese/ beside a dying cat.” Rather than linguistic playfulness, Howell’s verse exudes a grasping for cleverness, only rarely achieving moments of transcendence. At his best, some elegance emerges with simplicity: “I pray for my hands/ and the work thereof./ I pray for my soul though it may/ not matter, though the line/ is dead and the sky within me/ falling, dark, and starless.” But the majority of the collection—with inconsistent poems about Lucretius, biblical parables, Portuguese veterans, and more—reads more like a student responding to an array of prompts than a seasoned poet writing mindfully. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Love's Last Number and Christopher Howell:

"In these gemlike meditations on love and time and the human condition—and so much more—Christopher Howell's vision is nearly mystical, his music is almost entirely uncanny. To read these pieces is to experience what Owen Barfield called the “felt change of consciousness,” or poetry pursuing poetry’s highest calling. His poetry alters the way we might view our brief time here on Earth, by expanding it, by giving us glimpses into the secrets of existence itself, by making meaning. But, of course, because he is such a gifted poet, Howell approaches this enormous task through the senses, via the small things, and in language that’s both mesmerizing and plain-spoken. There is a distance in this tone that is all about clarity, and a proximity that is all about intimacy, humility. This is a book you’ll read in a sitting, and then return to all your life."—Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains

“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

"Whether against history, against aliens, against new chances, against every future, we human beings cannot quite get it right. And yet, these poems. Something. However improbable, and though they sacrifice themselves to the effort, we are offered some light. These are affecting, visceral offerings, leading us improbably forward. In these offerings, one could easily argue that we are quietly drawn into an entire book of war poems, demonstrating the abidingly cruel relationship between human beings and the inexorable. It is a circumstance so quietly and powerfully vivified time and again: 'The soldiers are through listening / and after awhile the tea is cold.' These poems give rise to so much emotion it can barely be contained, defining us all—and this book—as such small but incredibly necessary lights amidst a great, historic and personal wall of so much—'the pneuma of hope’s tiny bells.'"—Alberto Ríos, author of The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

"Once there were prophets, seers walking among us, seemingly more recognizable, welcomed, even feared. They knew the things we did not know, the truths we long for all our lives and would give our lives to know. They knew love's last number, the degree to which we hold each trembling and monumental day. Christopher Howell is our own prophet-seer. He knows the numbers of infinite angels dancing on infinite pins. He knows the stars within the stars within the stars within the skulls. He knows this wrong and shining world the way a boy comes to know it when forced by a teacher to write 'Dreaming makes us stupid' over and over on a chalkboard, when he knows already that dreaming is the god that makes us free. These poems are great gifts. They contain multitudes of Whitmanesque wisdoms. These poems read as what our fathers would say to us after they are dead and gone. These poems are necessary. They are essential."—John Hodgen, author of Grace

From the Publisher