Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell Graywolf (review)

D. A. Powell is at the top of his game. And Powell does love games: we might start with his new collection’s title, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which captures something of the tonal range he can manage with his tongue in his cheek (not that it ever stays there long). The oblique melodrama of Useless Landscape is linked to the winking A Guide for Boys by the antiquated, theatrical “or,” as in Twelfth Night, or What You Will. That’s three tones in seven words, which is about par for this book’s course: it’s a warning and a come-on, a lament and a love song. He exposes the “useless landscape” of our damaged, infertile world (and of the human body ravaged by lust), but he also writes us a guide to navigating and loving that world (and the body). And the back jacket cover—a map of a pale, lakepocked landscape that looks like one of Powell’s descriptions of the body (“Winded, white-haired body. Splotchy skin. / A face uneven as a river jag / and asperous as the mullein’s flannel leaves”)—is bordered on its four sides by the book’s title, relineated as a quiet plea: use less land scape.

The collection’s first half centers on a series of damaged human habitats: “One guy peeled labels off beer bottles here; another climbed / the remaining concrete piles and wrote justin loves, wrote / stephen loves . . . ,” Powell writes in “Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct,” his erotic verbs poignantly intransitive, like Whitman’s. The final poem in the series, “Landscape with Lymphatic System, System of Rivulets, System of Rivers,” is addressed to the poet’s hiv-weakened body; suddenly, the series of landscapes seems a crescendo into the human form. Indeed, for Powell, all landscapes finally stand for the body: “with you, I swim,” the poem ends, the double sense of “with” capturing the body’s dual function as inescapable companion and means to our ends.

At the end of this series, Powell lightens up: “If I can’t have my health, at least I’ll have my humor. / Good Humor. Here come the icecream man.” As if we needed proof that when life hands him ice, Powell makes ice cream, the second half (A Guide for Boys) begins:

Persimmons ripen with the first frost. The bitterness inflicted on them takes their bitterness away.

Would that there were some other way.

Powell is true to these words: though the shadow of his illness is integral to his poetic palette, he is anything but bitter. He’s virtuosically flirtatious even when imagining his life as a dog’s life, speaking as a wad of cum (“Backdrop with Splashes of Cum on It”), or styling his guide to sexual experience after a Boy Scout manual.

Tonal wizardry is nothing new for Powell, but his range has widened: his engagement with many major voices of the past century is now more apparent. Alongside his trademark techniques like integrating the titles of disco hits (the poem “Midnight Cowbell”), there are coyly Audenesque rhymes (“It’s okay, my dear / Someone cares for you here”); wry puns with Merrill’s deep sparkle (“The principal’s your pal and not the principle. / At least I’ve retained that”); an Ashberian ease with both archaism and contemporary slang; and thoughtful elaborations of Stevens’s sensual metaphysics:

Well, even to belong in this congested state, you have to spend a little bourbon on your nerves.     They keep their low-beams on.   It’s part of of, a subset of belong.

And then there’s “Tarnished Angel,” a chilling variation on Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Rilke encounters a fragmented statue of Apollo, god of the sun and of healing. Powell’s angel is “tarnished,” like an old statue—the legs are “slightly eroded,” his “shanks” are “cool verdigris”—but this damaged body belongs to Lucifer, the “tarnished” angel of the morning star, Venus. Here...