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![Monuments of rescue
A Contrary review by Gregory Lawless
 Pardon the highfalutin opening, but D.A. Powell is one of America’s most important living poets. Powell’s “long and jangly” lines, and his masterful shifts of diction and subject matter, among other lyrical pyrotechnics, have helped him to leave his quirky stamp on contemporary poetry (“In Retrospect: Kevin Prufer on D.A. Powell”). Perhaps it is because Powell has been so indifferent to winning any beauty contests that his poems have proved so unlawfully beautiful—and so inimitable, so formally adventurous and surprising. It is remarkable too that Powell has managed to delight his readers so much while writing about AIDS and other cataclysmic subjects. That said, Powell’s fourth and latest book, Chronic, is a work in transition. In this collection of poems, Powell trades in some of his charm for tragic gravity, with (somewhat) mixed but always fascinating results.
Certainly there are great poems in this book, “crab louse,” “centerfold,” “confessions of a teenage drama queen” and “collapse :”, to name just a few, that feature Powell’s signature wit and formal daring in the face of ever grimmer (personal, romantic and environmental) realities. But at times the poems in this book struggle to balance candor and artistry: “lights of the city growing more luminous, more inviting / who could have guessed love’s a palpable thing”; “subtanceless love / immune at last to gravity and time”; “no lifetime should bear such silence as these past few years have offered”; or “we kissed briefly in the deathless spring.” (“meditation upon the meaning of the line, ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic,” “courthouse steps,” “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” “sprig of lilac”).
These lines, and others like them, are unvarnished to a fault, but the book as a whole manages to achieve a sense of emotional urgency that makes Powell’s poetry as relevant as ever. Chronic compels, in part, because Powell can revel in subjective disclosure without marooning his poems in solipsistic or narcissistic predicaments. Many of these poems succeed because Powell often convinces us that both the self and world are in crisis, while he explores the ways in which we, reader and writer, can survive nonetheless: “us both fatigued, showing signs of wreckage” (“corydon & alexis”).
Chronic, as the title suggests, is obsessed with the constancy of physical suffering and heartbreak. These are (for the most part) quite serious poems that long for relief from both physical and spiritual pain--“I’ve got the keys to the pharmacy”--while contemplating the viability of love in a rotting world: “let’s pull out all the unused appliances / spread our flanks upon the grim barge of oblivion.”
All of the poem titles either begin or end with the letter c, suggesting the inevitable presence of chronic difficulties. Thus, nearly every yearning for delivery is tempered by tragic awareness. So much so, in fact, that even Powell’s romantic disclosures often propose sacrificial obliteration into or with the beloved as a solution to the problems that desire and lust precipitate:
“let me disappear / into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek” (“sprig of lilac”)
“you open the earth for me, receive these last amber leaves” (“continental divide”)
“you token of fleeting devotion / a pest, a pest, a rubious skin: douse us with kerosene” (“crab louse”)
“as with a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue” (“corydon & alexis, redux”).
After all this, death and consummation seem nearly synonymous. For Powell, then, the appropriate response to “crumpled thoughts” and “crumpled love” is to try to embrace a sense of love as temporary as the world (noble but impossible), in order to prepare, over and over again, for the fact that “nothing is ever going to last” (“corydon & alexis”).
The poems in this book are themselves imperfect solutions to chronic suffering; they create “monument[s] of rescue” that don’t cure us of any diseases but can perhaps dull the pain for a while (“coit tower and us”). One of the things I love about Chronic is that it takes love and personal suffering seriously, despite contemporary American poetry’s skepticism of dealing with these subjects without the armor of irony. This book is brave and wild, and many of the poems herein forge a reckless, and even resuscitating, beauty.
Gregory Lawless’s debut collection, I Thought I Was New Here, will be published this year by BlazeVOX. He teaches at Suffolk University in Boston.
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© 2009 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us
