Substrate: Poems

by Jim Powell

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.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Jim Powell is an American poet, translator, and classicist from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Powell’s poetry of 1977-2007 is collected in It Was Fever That Made The World (1989) and Substrate (2009). He has translated the poetry of Sappho (1993, rev. 2007) and selections from other ancient Greek and Latin lyric poets, and published essays and reviews. Thom Gunn and Robert Duncan were teachers, mentors and friends; he was a member of Duncan’s Homer Group. He was poet-in-residence at Reed College (1988–90), a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, a MacArthur Fellow (1993–98), the Sherry Poet at the University of Chicago (2005), and 2014 recipient of the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award for Poetry.

Reviews

[unnarrator · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this book through this article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...

And left it oddly disappointed. But because I can't articulate why, Powell's books are going to remain on my mental Geoffrey-Hillesque "keep rereading it until you either understand/appreciate it or you die, whichever comes first" shelf.

[Lawrence Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the range of California figures and places in the book.