Works by
Christopher Howell
(Poet)
[1946 - ]

As Editor

• Willow Springs #49 (January 2002)

• Willow Springs #45 (January 2000)

• Willow Springs #40 (June 1997)

Poetry

• Light's Ladder (2004) -- Winner Washington State Book Award
  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?"

• Just Waking (2002)
  Christopher Howell s poems rely on a redeeming darkness to bring themselves into the world. Through meditative, short lyrics, and an eerily quiet approach, Howell redefines the place of the self in a poem. These deceptively triumphant views of discovery and survival arrive in a place that welcomes us as both witnesses and participants.

• Through Silence: The Ling Wei Texts (1981, 1999)
  Though Silence: The Ling Wei Texts merges the various elements of the Western American poetic tradition - genuine and abiding interest in the individual, love for nature and the land itself, and mistrust of the social, political, and economic institutions imposed upon land and people alike - with Christopher Howell's gifts for irony and lyricism to produce a major book of American poetry in the Western tradition. That it does this within the persona of a 14th century Chinese scribe should fool no one aware of the influence of Asian art and thought upon the West.

• Lady of the Fallen Air: Poems from the Chinese (1998)
  Poetry Chapbook. Translated from the Chinese and with a preface by Christopher Howell. Fourteen lyric poems by ten different Chinese writers, including Li Po and T'ao Ch'ien, accompanied by ephemeral, almost pointillist illustrations, make up this elegant sweet-to-the-touch chapbook. "Chinese remains Chinese," writes Christopher Howell of the difficulties of translating these works, "one of the world's most wonderful and difficult languages, no matter what alphabet is employed to express it." As elegant as the chapbook itself, the poems are slow, stately gazes upon various topics that might be considered traditional to Chinese poetry.

• Memory and Heaven (1997)

• The Crime of Luck (1997)

• An Interview with Vern Rutsala (1994)

• Articulation (1993)

• On Freedom Street (1991)

• The Wu General Writes from Far Away (1990)

• Sea Change (1985) -- Winner 1986 Washington State Governor's Award

• Red Alders in an Island Dream (1980)

• Why Shouldn't I (1977)

• What a River Does Not Mean (1973)

Other

• Buffalo and Other Stories (1989)