Chronic

D.A. Powell, 45, established himself as the best poet of his generation—and arguably the most important poet under 50—with his first three wildly expansive and sharp-tongued collections, Tea, Lunch and Cocktails. Those books celebrate gay culture in the ’80s and chronicle lives, like Powell’s, gripped by HIV. They also reveal new possibilities for the contemporary lyric poem, which, in Powell’s hands, can splice together biblical references, subtle evocations of love and lust, movies, politics and pop music in a single multilayered poem.

Powell’s new collection, Chronic, extends and departs from the powers of his first three. Here again are the long lines, but now they’re more supple and responsive to their content, breaking suddenly into jagged stanzas that are more nakedly personal and fiercely public than ever before. Chronic observes America in a dark time (“if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will”); narrates a poet-professor’s cynicism about his students (“oh, you kids?/?still that awkward growth spurt that started when you were sperm”); and, most powerfully, traces the arc of a surprising, middle-aged love.

At the beginning, a new lover restores Powell’s faith in love—he says, “look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart: it broke open in your hands.” By the end, after betrayal, the worst fears are confirmed, as in the magisterial “Courthouse Steps,” in which, alluding to Catullus and Keats, Powell laments, “love should not be written in stone but...water.” Nothing—least of all life and love—lasts forever, or even very long, Powell says. But he leans hard on one consolation: From pain comes poetry. And unlike that love written in water, Powell’s poems are likely to last a long time.—Craig Morgan Teicher

Buy it now from bn.com >>

See more Book reviews >>