From the Archives of the Heart: Collected Poems

Alice O. Howell is known best as a unique writer, a Jungian therapist, an author of works on symbolism and The Beejum Book for children. She has also written poetry all her life. It was, in fact, her original vocation, practiced since the age of fifteen. Now eighty-seven, From the Archives of the Heart collects the author’s poems of more than seven decades. Organized chronologically, her poems tell the story of a deeply human life, one devoted to the spirit, continuous transformation, and both inner and outer development.

Through different forms, poetic and experiential, Alice Howell’s poems trace, in her own unique way, one woman’s path to the embodiment of Wisdom, whom she calls Sophia. As these poems map her life, they move from the visionary and philosophical to the mythological and the language of Jung. Because her life is always lived in relationship, these themes are also extraordinarily and constantly leavened by intimate, deeply moving poems of love:

Each star is a kiss
I would give you ―
Should others wake
to a starless night
you would be
lying in my arms
covered with light.

Understanding the very life of words themselves, Alice O. Howell’s language is fresh, often funny, and always incisive, cutting to the quick of her subjects. It is no wonder, then, that more than a few connoisseurs have long loved these poems, many never published before.