“There is almost no contemporary poetry I can think of capable of taking me where Christopher Howell’s poetry takes me: not on a journey of distance but of perspective. These poems contain the essence of poetry, rational thought subverted into an exquisite and unexpected new logic. Orphic, Miltonic, Rilkean, Howell is the poet I turn to when poetry eludes me, when I cannot remember my dreams, when I fail to love our human frailties.”

“What a range of emotions, and what a rightness of tone Christopher Howell can work into a poem. There is an honest ease in his voice and a clarity in his gaze, playful, melancholic, elegiac, and stoic by turns. He blends the ordinary and the fabulous the way a great guitar player bends and stretches a note without missing a beat.”

“Gaze leads its reader through a concatenation of perspectives to a simultaneously mournful and hopeful place. It leaves us with that indescribable feeling of interconnectedness that sometimes emerges from great literature wherein the particular, deeply meditated upon expands into the universal and makes us more than ourselves.”