Light’s Ladder

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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.