The Grief of a Happy Life

by Christopher Howell, Linda Bierds (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295746166
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	10/02/2019
Series:	Pacific Northwest Poetry Series
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell is author of a dozen poetry collections, including Love’s Last Number, Gaze, and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected. He has received numerous honors, including the Washington State Book Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and three Pushcart Prizes. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, he has been for many years director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in Eastern Washington University’s master of fine arts in creative writing program.

What People are Saying About This

Yusef Komunyakaa

"Christopher Howell’s The Grief of a Happy Life feels and reads like a gift. Each healing song takes lyrical twists and turns, and arrives at an abiding truth—a blessed ransom paid to soil and sky, body and soul, to the Earth. These summons spring out of quest and need, going back to Gilgamesh and Heraclitus, traveling on to moments of joy and wonderment, praises and elegies, to vows that seethe into atonement, along with everyday names daring to anchor lives fully lived. Here, in The Grief of a Happy Life, every vowel is weighed, every leap earned, and the sway of hope drives the natural music of a worthwhile journey."