Substrate

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.

Jim Powell's poetry awakens a deceptively quiet California, a landscape rich with wildflowers, mountains, lakes, ocean, egrets, hummingbirds, deer, and more than the eye of a poet can contain. Powell's collection holds all these. We discover a busy, shifting landscape of much more than open spaces and wildlife. California is a landscape of dreams and opportunities, a land of opportunistic dreamers. This is evident in the color, music, love, and loss that his poems extract from the visual substance of California. The result is poems like "Mimesis" and "Vernacular" or "Sovereignty" and "My Favorite Metaphor" that will mesmerize the reader. That our American world is a point where myriad desires meet is evident in the third part of Jim Powell's collection, when we are given poems that read like fluid ethnographic snapshots of an era of colonial and settler desires. California is a microcosm of a national history of outsiders' aspirations merging with--sometimes overriding--nature and indigenous worlds, a process that is always contested and often violent. What comes alive in gripping poems like "Epistemology" and "Our Music on the Shore" is the persistence of a place and its past, even in the face of its transformation through time. Substrate is a great read. Reviewed by Viola Allo