Customer Reviews

Substrate: Poems

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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

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.