Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting collection, Gaze, is a book of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection (touching a girl’s wrist) and striking brutality (a boy slamming a just-caught fish against a boat’s stern to kill it “as he was taught”). Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled—the past living on inside us as we live inside the physical world that surrounds us—and he reminds us particularly of how loss releases us into the present, how in the process of living, “everybody pays.”Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of inner life, and finally on the “other world” of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures. Shifting between lyric and narrative poetry, the many voices come together to question and explore our perception of the world. While many similarly ambitious books unwisely set out to stake a claim on wisdom, however, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility—and thus, through their quiet and careful examinations, offer a far greater kind of wisdom.
