D. A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press, 2009) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press, 2012)

To contact us Click HERE
Twobooks of poetry that I’ve returned to frequently over the past couple ofyears are the most recent books by San Francisco-based poet D. A. Powell, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guidefor Boys. I’ve followed Powell’s books since his 1998 debut, Tea,and his five volumes together form one of the most exciting, innovative bodiesof work in contemporary American poetry. Chronic and Useless Landscape are assuredin their voice and imagery, commanding and relaxed at once.
Thetitle of Chronic refers to manydifferent thematic aspects interspersed throughout the book, literally andfiguratively:  constancy (in thesense that pain and illness can be chronic and ongoing, just as life itself canbe, if we’re lucky), the persistent drives of desire and addiction (“chronic”being one of the slang nicknames for a drug like marijuana, for instance), butmost of all, in terms of time (chronicles, chronology, the ticking of the clockthat never lets up).  Powell alsoplays with the word via the poems’ titles and the sequencing of the collection,which is divided into three sections—“Initial C,” the long title poem, and“Terminal C.”  Over half of thepoems’ titles begin with the letter C, and nearly half of the poems’ titles endwith that same letter.
Thisis indicative of both the fullness and the playfulness in Powell’s poems.  All of the major motifs like love, sex,and death are underscored, delicately and deliberately, by fragments ofbeautiful but derelict landscapes, glittering shards of pop music andentertainment culture, and the slow-motion transition of an agrarian society toa thoroughly post-industrial one. Powell’s style and stance have taken root somewhere directly between acouple of other poets with distinct California ties, Robinson Jeffers and DavidTrinidad, though Powell’s poems don’t ever sound exactly like anybody else’s.
Situatedamongst crematoriums, California poppies, and continental divides is one ofPowell’s finest, most evocative poems, “meditating upon the meaning of the line‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic.” Even in his more formal and classically allusive moments, Powell isnever too far away from disco, and this poem raises that association tonear-classical heights:  “it’sstill 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery ofthe lyric hasn’t faded.  and loveis in the chorus waiting to be born.”
Bananarama,Michael Sembello, and B-movie horror flicks are also invoked elsewhere in thebook, alongside Maria Callas and Virgil. There’s an ode to a crab louse that’s as hilarious and trenchant asFrank O’Hara’s wonderful poem “Louise.” Chronic is the only poetry bookI know of that includes an actual fold-out centerfold (!) for two of its poems.  The amiable ghost of Walt Whitmanalways lingers here, too, in Powell’s long-limbed lines and hisall-encompassing eye as it sweeps across the plenitude of meanings ofAmerica.  And not just the Americanpast and present, but its potential future.  From the end of Powell’s poem titled “cancer inside a littlesea”:
“whatdoes it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speakorwho does not speak, whether the poems get writtenwhetherthe reader receives them whole, in part or not at all
childto come, what will you make of this scratched paradisethisreceptacle of soil, water, seed, bee, floating scat and sporebrutalwind and brutal tide.  theinsignificance of fortunes”

IfD. A. Powell's close concentration on squandered rural/urban hybrid landscapes began to take shapein Chronic, it became thesprawling connective tissue in UselessLandscape, or A Guide for Boys. During my very first reading of the book upon its release back in February, I was already in tears by the poem “Tender Mercies,” which is only the second piece in the collection, a rapturous apocalyptic prayer that’s suffused with redemptivehope:

“Theearth’s a little harder than it was.ButI expect that it will soften soon,          voluptuous in some age hence,becausewe captured it as art                        themoment it was most itself:fragile,flecked with nimbleweed,                                  and so alone,italmost welcomed its own ravishment.”
In“Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct,” Powell writes, “Ruin, by the wayside,you took as sacrament,” and that acts as a sort of aesthetic/religious missionstatement for the book.  He’s ableto find some overflowing gorgeousness wherever he turns, from a blossoming groveof almond trees to a young man in worn-out jeans strolling through a suburban shoppingmall.  I’ve kept swooning over“Boonies,” a sensuous remembrance of a youthful encounter that’s as close toCavafy (by way of Antler, perhaps) as anybody else has gotten:  “We’d keep together, he and I, / andwe’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue / each other through the crushof darkling rifts.”  The poem“Pupil” spins a swift reversal on the intellectual seduction of astudent/teacher relationship (“You are the headmaster.  Now you must master me”).
Ithink D. A. Powell is the poet who’s currently pouring the most of himself,with great candor and daring, right into his books.  Composed of equal parts humor and risk, poise and feeling, Chronic and Useless Landscape make an infinitely readable double-portraitthat continually resolves, without ever quite settling or coming into permanentfocus.  To quote thereassuring closing lines of “Tender Mercies”:
“Beunafraid of what the future brings.Iwill not use this particular blue again.”