from “Max’s Bath”

…

What happens next? Well I hold you
while Peg gets a diaper, you yell
when she heads down the hall.
And then you pee on me, my
shirt, a consecration
no one else has received. I hold you close,
like the cold spring rain
peering in at us, tapping the
blue windowpane with its
tiny dark and pudgy hands.

A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour — all these combine with a large-hearted embrace of existence in Ken Howe’s poems. Whether they are observing, with fine ironic wit, the vagaries of domestic life, elegizing lost ones, or raised in celebration of musical compositions, they remind us of the need to address the world with all our faculties alert, including a language alive with its native energy and luminosity.