Like the Irish playwrights including Sean O'Casey and Brian Friel who observed every nuance of daily life and transformed them into art, Jack Powers observes the living and the dying of everyone around him and makes memorable sonnets from what he sees. With intelligence, wit, and most of all compassion, these love poems that span the seven kinds of love (according to the ancient Greeks) are full of sentiment without being sentimental. Nothing is off limits. From the heartbreaking demise caused by dementia to the story of a nun who confesses to an abortion,
Powers manages to write a book in which the seriousness of Victor Frankl and the levity of Monty Python exist in harmony and even feel inevitable. Powers is at the height of his poetic powers when he writes about love and death. "I don't spend much time visiting parents' graves./ What's gone is gone and I've got nothing to say/ to the dead." Powers may not have anything to say to the dead but he has a lot to say about them. And how they inhabit and teach the living. The entire book is a memento mori and these poems not only remind us that we are going to die but
teach us how to live.
- Jennifer Franklin, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books.
2003)
Jack Powers' five-part collection, Still Love, considers the changing nature of love as we age. With each poignant portrayal of deep love, familial loss, or memory loss, we not only see into his own life, but into our own. Powers demonstrates that it's important to be able to say of those we love, as he notes in "A Nod to the Master," "I still see you," even when they are gone. His training as an artist is apparent in the rich images that convey his deep sense of longing. As he writes in "Every Snowflake," "Why stop at fifty words for snow or love? Coin a word each time/they fall, whitening weathered fields, making the world new." These poems teach us not only that "you must embrace your life"-however much of it we have left-but also that embracing it requires us to slow down long enough to see what our world is made of. He writes in "Keeper," "Even the boy knows/not to
speak, just feel the surf and watch the sky turn purple then black." This is love poetry to his wife and family, and to the world for his having lived in it.
-Laurel S. Peterson, Daughter of Sky
Everybody has taken their chances at love and fidelity in Jack Powers' endearing second collection, Still Love, many of them housed in his sonnets of modern architecture. (See the tiny-house half-sonnet about how to hold a heart.) His characters may be discovering more about each other, encouraging new liaisons at the senior memory center, even divorcing in their nineties. This is a book about enduring and declining,
engaging and resisting, persevering. It includes narratives about the poet as a young man in the company of the old people he'd "always liked [but] never wanted to be," as well as about the present-day retiree fashioning poems about the poems we've just read. A good Powers poem is one that laughs at itself--and at you--while paying close attention to shifts in diction and memory, and to the traps of longevity and belief, but most of all to the abundance and wonder of life.
--Amy Holman, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window
