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Cocktails
Antioch Review, The, Fall, 2004 by Malinda Markham
Cocktails by D. A. Powell. Graywolf Press, 72 pp., $14.00 (paper). Powell's diction is wholly original without sounding contrived--a beguilingly difficult task. In couplets, sonnets, or his signature long, collaged lines, Powell's half-broken grammar creates a stark, distinctive music that rings almost perfectly true. Cocktails offers one young man's life (real, imagined, or both) glimpsed through three consecutive lenses: the cocktail scene, films, and the New Testament. In this last and most compelling section, Powell speaks as Mary Magdalene, Peter, and other personae in tense and anachronistic meditations on sickness, sex, and a muted kind of redemption.
In one poem, Lazarus proclaims, "holy is the viscera." Throughout the book, images of the body--broken and dangered; beautiful, promiscuous, and human--provide narrative cohesion and offer a fleeting transcendence. At times, the speaker grins at the reader like a kid raised on pop music: he is Peter Pan, "a priapic boy," a college student sorting his lover-roommate's dirty socks, using "bleach-free Tide to hinder chafing." Faced with mortality, however, the grin disappears; by the final section, one speaker can say with translucent dignity: "the way to heaven seems interminable. I creak and shuffle / listen you wilderness: make plain and let me pass."
Sometimes in these poems, almost any image leads to genitals or sex (even the biblical Mary contemplates her son's private parts). Occasionally, too, the sexual diction seems too easy: a pun on "prick" and "come," lust symbolized by muskmelon and peaches. However, throughout the book, and especially in the third section, poems open up into complex and dizzyingly original expressions of desire: the poem "[strange flower in my hands. porphyry shell. clipped wool]" begins with that strange and wonderful titular line and ends: "... I will // bed thee down in a pasture and make a berm of your torso. I am the marsh / above, a dipper pours thick liquid of your veins: cold now catch you I do."
COPYRIGHT 2004 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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