The richly textured poems in Lunch, companion volume to D. A. Powell's acclaimed debut collection, Tea, tell the story of a life; like a conversation stretched out over many lunch breaks. Hailed as "formally innovative, disjunctive but tender and always emotionally expressive" by Forrest Gander, its poems are both masticatibly small and immensely satisfying. The life in question is bifurcated by the diagnosis of HIV; "time splits," in these layered and evocative poems, as the poet's memories of childhood and adolescence are fractured by the knowledge of adulthood.
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From Publishers Weekly
Powell's debut Tea was a startling, sparkling, sexy book of sonnet-like constructions; its vast range of references and emotions, and its distinctively lengthy, chunky lines, created an original 3-D picture of a young gay man's life, loves and times. This similar but far-less subtle volume reads like rehearsals and rough drafts for Tea. Epigraphs and allusionsAto Frank O'Hara, Hart Crane, Hollywood cinemaAkeep Powell's sophisticated tastes (and his taste for collage) before us, but don't offset his frequent sentimentality. "once we kissed the world/ goodbye aware that it was dying," one poem opens; another announces "my soul he has no hours to waste/ but is a wasting word." Tea played high art, pre-Stonewall gay language, traditional elegiac modes and contemporary symbols of youth against one another to great effect. Bringing in piercings ("boys admired your jewels"), greeting a "slo mo. po mo. ho mo," "preparing for an antebellum barbeque," and deciding "I'll pick up your tab/ you got the cab," Powell's new volume attempts the same modes, but with less depth. (It hurts that almost all the new poems are shorter than the old; those juxtapositions need room to breathe.) The volume does offer some erotic power, and a flashily pleasing, fast-moving array of tropes: lovers are flower and insect, minotaur and labyrinth, dolphin and diver; a "song of the cinema" introduces "witchdoctors," "evil barbies," "caymans and gators/ written in an enjoyable present." And a closing set of poems about an HIV diagnosis gather weight and coherence the other work lacks. Powell's energetic talents clearly have more than Tea to offer; admirers put off by this quick Lunch should make plans now for an evening meal. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Written at a time when much poetry seems to rise from false emotion, D. A. Powell's poems - of love, lust, and the physical and psychological reality of sickness - are sincere. Yet authenticity is not their only virtue . . . these poems derive their power from a keen sensitivity to the potential of language to pun, sing, and give us experience, sometimes simultaneously. Powell never lets us forget that we are having a linguistic experience as well as a visceral one . . . Powell's work shows canonical influence - Williams, cummings, H.D., and Eliot most notably - and yet maintains its own predominant voice, that of a truth teller who metes out accuracy with a fierce but well-spoken intelligence." --BOMB Magazine
"His poems take place in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, and their strange juxtapositions, at first glance devoid of overt emotionalism, sometimes bring you running around a blind corner straight into a fist."--San Jose Mercury News, "Bay Area's Best Poetry Books of 2000"
"The poems of Lunch [have] the dazzle of double-exposed film, but this style has substance, mimicking as it does the fickleness of memory itself. Powell's formalism is not only distended and sonic, but also the product of a subtly tailored typography and syntax . . . [a] polished yet troubling volume." --Boston Review
"His poems take place in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, and their strange juxtapositions, at first glance devoid of overt emotionalism, sometimes bring you running around a blind corner straight into a fist."--San Jose Mercury News, "Bay Area's Best Poetry Books of 2000"
"The poems of Lunch [have] the dazzle of double-exposed film, but this style has substance, mimicking as it does the fickleness of memory itself. Powell's formalism is not only distended and sonic, but also the product of a subtly tailored typography and syntax . . . [a] polished yet troubling volume." --Boston Review
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spare, haunting, elegant,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lunch (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)
The cover says it all: a sumptious array of beautiful young men being devoured by a creature half-human (the human immuno-virus in the guise of the minotaur). This is the most breathtakingly original poetry, full of humor and heartache, loss and anger and joy. How the author manages to fuse all of this into these small, sonnet-like poems is beyond me. Imagine Kafka, O'Hara, Rimbaud, Rilke, Stein, Spiegelman and Lenny Bruce inhabiting the same bed. It's an orgy of voices, a choir of the most sardonic and most holy kind.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Des jeunes et ...,
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This review is from: Lunch (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)
All ellipses are 1 of 3: arch of triumph, flying buttress or road to nowhere. Conscientious writers believe they leave only 1s and 2s. Readers, because they're translators, mostly see 2s and 3s. When your second language is marginal, its nouns and adjectives pop up, trawl for meaning, net flotsam, jetsam and wriggling reflections. Powell's lines are archipelagoes, bright islands, ridgelines whose range a little effort reveals. Code breaks into allusion while double ententes mount other puns to ride their conceits coltish, and cultish. His lines' time breaks/ caesuras/ pleats even disappear at one point. With conventional capitalization and punctuation, "[darling can you kill me ..." could have been written by the Donne scholar in Wit. These bits of offstage action can take you on a long walk off a short pier, but no malice is intended, or no more than a child has when sharing the "catch" of a riddle, or later, the word joys in Ulysses. In short, to serve serious, varied and of a piece subject matter, Powell's bottom line is most advisedly broken. Don't miss it.
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