Overview

"In five sets of ""broken"" sonnets, Jack Powers pulls readers into and through the lives, decisions, regrets and celebrations of a score of deeply human characters--himself included. From teenager Jack, who tries to ""rig"" the Catholic confessional system, to ancient Bob, who tends his dying Joan gently after 62 years of marriage, we watch and find ourselves rooting for Powers' people. We want his seeds to grow, his buds to blossom, his dying leaves to drift in pleasant breezes. We hear the quiet laughter hiding under the songs. Still, life is complex, and Jack Powers feels that complexity with the sensitivity of a seismometer, records it with the accuracy of a mathematician or painter, and plays it like jazz. So listen-and watch--as sonnet rules loosen, lines lengthen, images double back and become symbols, and stories echo other stories. Last Acts come first in this collection, followed by portraits of relationships which are Still Love: a stoned teen grilling burgers for his family; Alice Neel painting brutally honest self-portraits. Sonnet form runs like tangled wire through Powers' book, perhaps most noticeably in the Still Love pieces, and in the section titled Unruly Love, where form and content collaborate in unruling the expected rules. Noble Suffering poems are case studies testing philosophical notions about the value of suffering-with ... tentative results. Still, the final section of Still Love, aptly titled Surrender, ends with a memory of a young Jack, ""floating, surrendering/ to the current, a contented speck of the quick river, white moon, black night."""

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9781952232756

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Reviews

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

"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"

Author Information

Jack Powers is the author of EVERYBODY'S VAGUELY FAMILIAR. His poems and essays have appeared in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, THE CORTLAND REVIEW, THE NEW YORK TIMES and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 CONNECTICUT RIVER REVIEW PoetryContests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 RATTLE Poetry Prizes. He and his wife, Anne, live in Fairfield CT and havethree children scattered across the country. He recently retired from Joel Barlow High School after 38 years of teaching specialeducation, English and math. His website is http: //jackpowers13.com/poetry/.

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