In a review of Jim Powell’s 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 Powell’s 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.
Substrate: Poems
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Powell has a gift for using a series of lists that magically add up to a sum far greater than their parts." -- San Francisco Chronicle
“Together these poems are a marvel. Powell’s subject is nothing less than how energy and power rise, decay, then reconstitute themselves in the human and natural worlds. To learn how thrilling, how magisterial this can be, see ‘Temperament,’ see ‘Ghost Dance Witch Hunt Blues.’ An exhilarating book.”
—Frank Bidart, author of Desire
Praise for Jim Powell’s Previous Work
“I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. Jim Powell not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and se we grasp it as we read. In the meeting of opposites . . . he has tapped a subject matter that is endless ad important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything.”
—Thom Gunn
“Together these poems are a marvel. Powell’s subject is nothing less than how energy and power rise, decay, then reconstitute themselves in the human and natural worlds. To learn how thrilling, how magisterial this can be, see ‘Temperament,’ see ‘Ghost Dance Witch Hunt Blues.’ An exhilarating book.”
—Frank Bidart, author of Desire
Praise for Jim Powell’s Previous Work
“I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. Jim Powell not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and se we grasp it as we read. In the meeting of opposites . . . he has tapped a subject matter that is endless ad important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything.”
—Thom Gunn
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The base...,
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This review is from: Substrate: Poems (Hardcover)
On my online Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, the first definition of "substrate" is:
"the base upon which an organism lives..." In the short poem "Rates of Combustion" Powell begins The air thins and clears above eight thousand feet and distances draw nearer: a silver pine snag falls in the forest and over decades disintegrates as layer under layer the rings of yearly growth break down in fragments, the fat years and the lean, fissure and crumble slowly inward toward heartwood... The disintegrating silver pine has become substrate: anyone who has walked in the high Sierra has surely noticed, but perhaps never thought carefully through, what Powell here vividly brings to our attention: the death and slow disintegration of the pine, now over many years making soil for its descendants, destined along the way, it may happen, to provide fuel to cook a high country trout which nourishes a human being. The latter's only real function in this complex and delicate ecosystem may be to comprehend it, and to try to do justice to it, poetically and scientifically. The poet Robert Pinsky writes of Powell's book: "In Substrate Jim Powell has written unforgettable, fierce poems concentrating on historical, mostly 'ordinary' individuals whose lives, with their annals of depredation and survival, reflect the history of California from colonization to the present." Robert Pinsky, New Yorker (Dec. 17, 2009) I can't recommend this book too highly. I've purchased it as a gift for about twenty friends, and turn to it myself again and again, delighted and amazed. Jamie Woolery
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sad and luminous masterpiece,
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This review is from: Substrate: Poems (Hardcover)
The poems in "Substrate" possess so much gravitas and subtlety of craft that they make most of contemporary poetry seem lightweight and artificial by comparison. Powell's command of the forms pioneered by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Thom Gunn, and others is sublime and self-assured: the words reside on the page, and then in the mind, as if they were incised in stone. The primary subject is how avarice has all but destroyed the Earth, particularly Powell's native California, but by reclaiming one of poetry's primordial vocations -- giving the wilderness a voice in the human world -- Powell has accomplished something heroic and redemptive. An enduring book.
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