Softly Beating Wings

The Fort Worth Poetry Society, with the Poetry Society of Texas, is extremely proud to present this marvelous collection of poems by Ann Howells, a fine local poet. She was the perfect choice for this year's William D. Barney Memorial Chapbook Contest. There is an easy smoothness and a visual clarity to the images Ms. Howells has created that renders the reader a co-conspirator in the moments she is describing. When she writes in Luminescence - "Here, too, lie rough planks of pier like toughened hide, and a sun burning through in molten gold gleam," the reader feels the wooden planks and the warmth of the sun. Reading on, in Starlings - "They settle like discontent, these unlovely birds, stub-tailed and gauche, Hitchcockian the way they sweep down, dull unpolished feathers, bodies too compact for grace," I did not just see those graceless birds, I felt the beating of their wings in my heart. Here is what other poets and editors have to say about her work: "Ann Howells' poetry sings with the buzz and crackle of life here in the Southwest. She paints portraits of katydids and dragonflies, things with feathers or fins, even things of the human kind, with an eye so close to the ground-level world, we want to lean down as well; down where she tells us, 'It is difficult to be an atheist here.'" Nathan L. Brown Oklahoma Poet Laureate 2013-2014 "'Pleased with the architecture.' A line from the poem Katydids. What an excellent phrase. This is a book of observations. No agenda, no cause, no strident voice. It's easy enough for less talented poets to explicitly assign connotations, or metaphors, to images. Here in this book, Ann Howells has instead assigned an implicit intimate metaphor: the quiet that is the holiness of watching nature." Alan Birkelbach Texas State Poet Laureate 2005 "Reading Ann Howells' poems, you always know where she is, and where you are. She takes you to the places she knows, shows you who and what lives and grows there, offering an invitation you will not refuse. She covers lots of country, from a seaside ice cream stand, and the sexy redhead who turns heads there, to the dry high country of West Texas, where people speak a vernacular as 'twangy as guitar strings.' Wherever she stands, she puts you in the picture, where you will know that you belong. Paul J. Sampson Former Non-Fiction Editor, Eclectica