Living in a Glowing World
By Trisha Adelena Howell

     Poetry got kick-started again as a force in American culture- first with poetry slams and Dead Poets Society-and now with Trisha Adelena Howell's Living in a Glowing World, a marvelously spiritual, sensory feast of seasonal poetry that combines Chinese feng shui, Native American connectedness, and a gratitude for nature and our very force of life that all religions can and do celebrate. If Howell's poems were paintings, they might look like Edna Hibel's, with the same deep reverence for the quiet everyday pleasures and the sacredness of nature.

     Readers know Howell as the author of The Princess and the Pekinese and the channel for her beloved Pekinese Sir Addison Silber Howell's musings in The Pekinese Who Saved Civilzation. The poetic side to Howell's nature reveals itself as she explores the forgotten nuances of the seasons: watery renewal of winter, airy refreshment of Thaw, creative growth of Spring woods, passionate sultry fiery Summer, grateful Harvest, and metallic balance of Autumn. Edward Abbey and Rachel Carson, as well as Walt Whitman, who is quoted in one of the section headings, would approve of Howell's translation of their environmental essence into poetry. You'll find no angry feminist men-rape-the-earth poetry here. Howell, who writes passionately and sensitively of her loving marriage with hubby Dr. Dean Howell, presents an interconnected tapestry of all life, male, female, deer, plant, snow, and puppy. Her love for dogs romps joyfully into the book in the poem Spring, which begins, "Silly puppy sprinting springing". A non-pretentious (no smug nihilistic MFA student angst here!) word like "puppy" gets elevated to poetry in Howell's deft verse, and rightly so, for Howell's poems celebrate "What's Really Important." Howell quotes poet Mary Oliver in the chapter heading for Spring, right before the puppy poem:

     "Poetry is a life-cherishing force….For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry."

     Howell's rich, life-affirming poetry is an antidote to cynicism, fast-food-infotainment, and shock value in our culture. Her glowing words give us back that glowing world.