Bill Howell, a poet who faces mysteries with clarity, and experience with freshness, and who I've been honored to present in The Best Canadian Poetry Series, now gives us The Way Things Are at the Moment, a splendid consideration of things and relationships-at once ephemeral and enduring.
-Molly Peacock, author of The Widow's Crayon Box
The Way Things Are at the Moment conjures a world of words where the connections and relationships between things, moreso than the things themselves, matter most. Where walking a Nova Scotia beach leads into rooms packed with memories. Where an operation exposes Miles Davis' trumpet. And where being alone never happens in isolation. Independent of linear time, each poem offers a fractal view of what one cannot really discern until the book's end - how much our conventions of time, space and memory fail to suppress not so much what we want to say but what we want to feel.
-James Carson, editor, Queen's Quarterly
I'd recognize a Bill Howell poem at any time in any place. Controlled, powerful, playful-quite special to have his own distinct voice when it sings so well. Reading his description of the natural world-sky, clouds, sea, trees, sun, moon, animals of all sorts-I wondered how many zillion poets have described these same phenomena. Yet his are so fresh, so surprising, so tightly written, they seem unique and new and delight every time. Lots to enjoy here, and provoke thought. These poems have a lifetime of living in them.
-James W. Nichol, author of Midnight Cab
Bill Howell has had a literary career spanning five decades. With six poetry collections to his credit, his work appears regularly in literary journals and anthologies across Canada, in the UK, Australia, Sweden, Japan, and the U.S. Born in Liverpool, England, he grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto for more than half his life. Bill was a network producer-director at CBC Radio Drama for thirty years. Ranging from the lyrical to the ironic, his poetry deploys colloquial language, deliberate narrative, and a sharp sense of the focused moment.
