Howes's later work is more openly personal than these brilliantly contrived early pieces. No one need feel alone looking up at leaves. There are such depths to them, withdrawal, welcome, A fragile tumult on the way to sky. This great trunk holds apart two hemispheres We lie between . . . Constant as water lilies we lie still, Our breathing like the lapping of pond water, Balanced between reflection and reflection.
Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going.
Howes's work has undergone many changes in the forty-five years covered by this new volume, but from beginning to end her poetry bears a personal stamp. A reader never mistakes her poems for the work of another writer. Instead, she achieves originality in the most difficult way, by knowing exactly what she should write about and saying it exactly in her own way.