Synopses & Reviews
In a review of Jim Powells first book, Thom Gunn praised his poetry for tapping “a subject matter that is endless and important . . . achieved in the poem, so we grasp it as we read.” Substrate gathers three new collections of Powells poetry, the work of a dozen years. These poems open inward windows on the world outward from indigenous habitat in Northern California. They include the past as an aspect of the present, and spirit as a dimension of the actual. The title poem summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history to focus through the lens of poetry an adult view, over their shoulders, of California history—a compound portrait or collage sampling the indelible strata that compose the cultural substrate of the region. Diverse in theme, stance, tone, genre, and form, the poems in this collection are characterized by lucidity and penetration, plainspoken intensity, compression, and depth.
Synopsis
When Jim Powell's first collection of poems was published in 1989, Thom Gunn declared, He has the power to do anything. Mary Kinzie wrote, Page for page, there is more metaphorically gorgeous writing than I have seen in some time. Here is his much-anticipated new collection.
Jim Powell's poems move between the metaphysical and the physical with a rare, plainspoken intensity
and eloquence. At the heart of Substrate is a grand sequence of poems that encompasses the cultural history of northern California in a kaleidoscope of artifact, memento, observation, and consideration. At
once accessible and haunting, these poems resonate with the layers of experience, expectation, and substance that make up the patchwork of surfaces that define our known world.
Synopsis
At the heart of this haunting yet accessible work is a sequence of poems that encompasses the cultural history of northern California in a kaleidoscope of artifact, memento, and observation.
About the Author
JIM POWELL is the author of It Was Fever That Made The World and the translator of The Poetry Of Sappho and Catullan Revenants. He was awarded include a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993-1998, and he was the Sherry Memorial Poet at the University of Chicago in 2005. He is a fourth generation native and lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay region.