Customer Reviews

Lunch (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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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.

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.