Love’s Last Number

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. [em](Feb.) [/em]