a friend once asserted that poetry is a backward logic, Howe examines her life as a critic would a poem, unraveling it to see how technique and form contribute to meaning. She recalls an instructive reflection by Walt Whitman, who said that the poet expresses the result of many experiences and observations uniquely wrought. Looking to identify the motivations that have resulted in her engagement with writing and her art, she recognizes in herself the compulsion Whitman described. Having received accolades for her novels, collections of stories, essays, poems, and other memoirs, Howe in this memoir composes essays, poems, and fragments with the verve, passion, and unique voice characteristic of her work. Together, they constitute her “Notes on a Vocation.”

Howe describes a journey that is, in many ways, the journey of every person, her own pilgrim’s progress. Proclaiming that she would have preferred in life to have been sure of a destination, she instead describes in a poem the metaphoric, mysterious winter landscape in which she finds herself, unsure of the meaning or implication of what she sees. Each metaphorical step brings with it a sense not of what is ahead but of what is just behind, as well as of revelation. This poem describes at least one aspect of her life experience. She longs for knowledge of what is right for her in the future and longs when she arrives to know that she is there. She demonstrates through her poems and her assessment of insights gleaned from others that she must work within the dichotomies of her experience and perception and live with, even balance, opposing inclinations and bewilderment.

“Branches” symbolizes the most basic part of Howe’s being. The title refers to the facts, the genes, and the circumstances of her life. Her early childhood remains vivid to her: She was born during a lunar eclipse when the United States was on the brink of World War II. Her father joined the Army when she was three, and his absence shaped her family’s lives. She recalls an image of him waving good-bye from the top of the stairs, and he maintains this place for her, evoking a slightly distant and idealized presence. This sense of her father contrasts with Howe’s sense of her mother working long hours but radiating energy, as she wrote for and directed a theater group and passionately discussed books with Howe’s older sister. Recognizing in herself a distinct consciousness, Howe withdrew from their exchanges, observing the world she inhabited, preoccupied with the drama of weather in Boston and with the movement of light across her room.

When her father returned from the war, Howe recognized differences in her parents. Her mothersurrounded by people, immersed in dramaoften longed for her Irish home and the causes she had embraced there. Her fatherscholarly, quiet, and ardentwas often involved in political action, first supporting intellectuals against the attacks of Joseph McCarthy and then pursuing civil rights. Howe remembers herself as drawn to both parents yet choosing to observe her engaged family from the vantage point of the middle of the stairs.

Through the years, Howe’s experiences and interactions with people fostered her growth, recognition of many social realities, and assimilation of ideas and artistic methods. In “Person, Place and Time,” she describes many experiences and people that shaped her direction. Two marriages brought her emotional pain and certain realizations about self and society. Having children introduced a new joy and new social discoveries. The circumstance of having children acquainted her not only with marital issues of parents connecting with each other and with children but also with issues of race, class, and gender discrimination. Her children also helped her recognize the joy of simple daily doing. Being loved by them and being with them provided a most accessible way to experience life. Going to the park, reading stories, and giving baths alternated with and relieved the activities of reading, ruminating, and writing.

Many philosophers, artists, and writers have become significant teachers for or influences upon Howe, including Thomas Aquinas, to whom she frequently alludes. Simone Weil’s words and life figure most importantly in her memoir. Robert Lowell, the first poet Howe got to know well, became a mentor and father figure to her. His own work exemplifies the project of using one’s life to provide content and to shape the form of a body of work. Henry Hampton, in creating the documentary Eyes on the Prize, modeled for Howe creating through collaborating and developed groundbreaking techniques for showing the interior lives of his subjects. His technique, which Howe defines as creating the prolonged now, employs close-in camera work to reflect an action that combines both intention and resolution. This technique resonated with Howe’s own intention, and she adapted it to poetry and fiction. Jacques Lusseyran’s work echoed Howe’s own love of light. His description of how to survive a concentration campand, by implication, lifethrough developing personal attachments and working for others resonated with Howe’s own discoveries as well.

Howe discusses others who inspired her. Sara Grant’s study of Jesus, leading to the insight that Jesus is a process and not an end, seems to embody the spiritual and intellectual approach to life that Howe has internalized. In the work of Michel de Certeau, Howe found such beautiful words and images even in footnotes that she longed simply to appropriate them into her own poems. Antonia White and Emily Brontë also model techniques that Howe analyzes in her memoir, demonstrating the way they reveal their inner conflicts and longing. Howe ruminates on these authors’ considerations of the eternal, as well as the works of others, including a prayer to St. Raphael reflecting a universal longing to return to a more encompassing state of existence. These considerations provoke her further meditations on the nature of the future and direct her focus to another dimension of such preoccupations, the nature of time.

One of Howe’s poems fixes a memory of a revelation experienced in winter that suggests a startlingly disturbing insight about the relationship between time and the world. The poem connects a thread introduced earlier in the bookthat of finding directionwith the study of a fifth century Indian grammarian of Sanskrit called Bhartrhari. He asserted a connection that Howe also perceives between grammar and timeand ultimately the eternal. This argument takes words to be grammar and emphasizes that words bring something into being, as in the biblical formulation, “In the beginning was the Word.” Words extract order from a chaos; they create a recognizable, understandable articulation of the internal, creating and revealing a unity. They require a listener who in effect enables the word by waiting for it, anticipating it. Words bring the past into the present as they define it. Howe, by following this train of thought, comes to understand the future as an apprehension of the past from another location. In contrast to her ruminations on time, she participates in a spiritual retreat that again exhorts the value of beneficent action. She considers whether to embrace thinking or doing.

In The Winter Sun, Howe shows the circuitous path she has taken to arrive at the balance she achieves in her art. Demonstrating that she is drawn to the satisfactions inherent in actionwhether working for social justice or digging a gardenand articulationextracting order from experienceshe expresses artistically the challenge of living with and in uncertainties. Her assertion elsewhere that she is an agnostic Catholic, and the poetic title of this memoir evoke just such a synthesis. Howe ends this poetic mediation in the company of children. As they eat a baguette, she sips wine.