In Christopher Howell's twelfth collection of poems, his gifts for elegy, humor, and lyricism are on full display. The Grief of a Happy Life explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that happiness and grief inform one another and give our lives fullness and vitality. Arranged in four sections, Howell's poems feature not only these concerns, but a large and various cast of characters as well. Aeneas, Saint Theresa, Ovid, Kierkegaard, a German submarine, and so much more are woven together with Howell's trademark precision and accessibility into exquisite tableaux, each providing a view of both what we must live with and what we must not live without.

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. A soldier remembers limes and curious children in Portugal. Refugees cross a dangerous land, and find each other in love. Boy scouts play war in devastating ways, a child listens to a baseball game in a more innocent time. In this multiplicity of voices and tones, the collection reflects on what we, as humans, do about memory, love, grief, war, and the search for meaning. 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 hilarity: laughter against the darkness.

The story of the rise and fall of the early nineties band Smart E's as told by one of the founding members.

Poetry. In this remarkable anthology of poems about Weldon Kees or inspired by Weldon Kees--each accompanied by a statement by the poet regarding Kees's influence, magic, and power over the imagination of 20th Century American poetry--the editors Christopher Buckley and Christopher Howell have scored a major coup in American letters. Coupled with these poems are nearly 20 essays by some of the greatest lights of 20th Century American poetry, including Dana Gioia and Joseph Brodsky.

I have written this book to encourage others who have been diagnosed with cancer, to show that cancer can be beaten provided that you take the right positive attitude, how by making use of alternative therapies can improve the outlook on future, how by altering your diet can help make things easier to cope with and also to give some extra positive emotional support. Because sadly, the NHS does not appear to provide adequate emotional support to people who at a time of need are not even asked if they require any counselling for the shock they receive at this type of news. And to give carers some idea of what their loved ones are feeling or maybe a insight to how the treatments are affecting them or the one being cared for at a highly emotional time and not knowing what the future might bring for them all. Lastly, all the profits from the sale of this book are going to Hospice Care in Cornwall, as they do not recieve much funding from the Government and more should be done to finance their type of work for the cared for and their carers.

In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with: And if he remembers now he is in love, which is the soul's condition, and alone because that is how we live. "How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live? Keats When Keats, at last beyond the curtain of love's distraction, lay dying in his room on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini Fountain "filling him like flowers," he held his breath like a coin, looked out into the moonlight and thought he saw snow. He did not suppose it was fever or the body's weakness turning the mind. He thought, "England!" and there he was, secretly, for the rest of his improvidently short life: up to his neck in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries of street venders, perfect and affectionate as his soul. For days the snow and statuary sang him so far beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow of his last words to Severn, "Don't be frightened," may enter you.

This generous volume of new and selected poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a storyteller's informality. It also shows the development of his signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in poems "connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details." These are poems of palpable force. Howell thinks out loud as he works his way through what charms, challenges, and defines the human project. He questions, tests images and associations, and leaps, trusting himself, into midair. In consequence, the cerebral energy propels his poems beyond statement and into startlingly evocative modes, grappling with and sifting profound matters of memory, imagination, and grief, tempered always by joy.