Poetry with a double vision

Some poets show us the exterior world and others ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both.

Sylvia Plath surveyed and stoked the fires within her; Gary Snyder is far happier scouting for forest blazes in the Sierras.

Until he began publishing the wickedly well-tuned work collected in "Chronic," D.A. Powell seemed of the Plath school: fierce, inward and wrapped in tongues of camp. To read his poems was to watch a man blow on the embers of erotic memory.

But, it appears, Powell has been holding back. "Chronic," his fourth book, shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle award and winner of this year's Kingsley Tufts Prize for poetry, is one of those rare collections that move beautifully between poetry's inner/outer stereopticon. Powell can paint the weed-choked cemeteries of California's Central Valley and also the cluttered toy chest of his memory. Writing on love, his powerful double vision becomes one.

He achieves this through the precision of his language. Clipped of capitals, broken apart by extra spacing, his lines detonate like land mines.

Writing in the shadow of AIDS, Powell is a modern romantic: obsessed, enraged and turned about by love. His language is infiltrated by songs, phrases from movies, the treacle-sweet sound tracks of musicals. "Love," he writes in one poem, "is the chorus waiting to be born."

Romantics always have plenty to say about longing -- and distance. So does Powell. But this does not make for the best poems in the collection. "Coit Tower & Us" turns some wonderful phrases but fails to move beyond the same vague terminology that made symbolist love poems so similar to the Romantics whose style they rejected.

The exciting thing about reading Powell is how quickly he follows up a flashy surface work like "He's a Maniac, Maniac," which sings a giddy self-pity, with a harrowing poem like "Crossing Into Canaan," which describes being loved while in the most horrific physical state. Illness and love are similar, these poems remind us, in their chronic nature. They do not stop for one another; they refuse logic.

Camp, then, is the perfect aesthetic. It entitles Powell to break rules, to snap back. And it allows him, in poems like "Cosmos, Late Blooming," to make light of the terror that lurks within when one wants to love, even in the face of death. It would be so much easier, perhaps more comforting, for Powell to believe in eternity. Beautifully, bravely, "Chronic" is the work of a poet who believes instead in the fire this time.