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brice_mo's review
4.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!
Reminiscent of Mark Nowak’s Shut Up, Shut Down, albeit it without the strict documentarian impulse, Michael Dickman’s Pacific Power & Light is intensely interested in place—not merely geography, but how it is occupied. This is a book about the joys of nature and how people sully them.
These poems aspire to a kind of pure materiality, and they convey a joyous, naturalistic hedonism. They are populated with insects, plants, fish, and every form of life one can imagine. The only deterrent to this life, it would seem, is the antagonism of human intervention. For example, in “Rainbow Salmon,” we read:
Nothing ever happens how you want it to
Eating air
Breathing through disease and glucose
Ourselves a load of Pepto Bismol.
We are tricked out in sunlight and sorry for everything
The poems in Pacific Power & Light are comprised of strongly imagistic fragments that often reject formal syntax in favor of a staccato brevity. Normally, I think this approach leads to a feeling of sterility, but here it does something different. Across the poems, meaning is enigmatic while desire is lucid. There are very few lines in which readers can parse a pure idea, but the feeling that emerges is the pulse of memory. These are poems in which the inarticulable ache of nostalgia is left unarticulated, and they are all the better for it.
The rare moments of clarity are interruptions, and they often carry less weight than the lines that cannot be understood. It is as if the narrator suggests a kind of inversion—that “rational” thoughts are the ones that don’t make sense. For example, we read the following in the titular poem:
Milk teeth on the new fern did you see it? / I want to concentrate on you.
There are sections where humans feel more present, but it’s almost entirely to highlight their destructive impulse. The few references that are more overtly positive suggest either a kind of transience or similarity to the natural world. The beautiful is not that someone can behold a flower—it is that they can be like a flower.
Ultimately, the book culminates in a series of poems sharing the title “All Fucked Up,” and this is where we find the most explicit tension between the pleasures of nature and its destruction from humankind:
Over dogwoods
And Ketamine
No comply and the upper
Tributaries
Readers can choose celebration or self-destruction.
Pacific Power & Light is best accepted as a book you let wash over you, and by the end of the collection, I found myself wanting to experience nature the same way.
Reminiscent of Mark Nowak’s Shut Up, Shut Down, albeit it without the strict documentarian impulse, Michael Dickman’s Pacific Power & Light is intensely interested in place—not merely geography, but how it is occupied. This is a book about the joys of nature and how people sully them.
These poems aspire to a kind of pure materiality, and they convey a joyous, naturalistic hedonism. They are populated with insects, plants, fish, and every form of life one can imagine. The only deterrent to this life, it would seem, is the antagonism of human intervention. For example, in “Rainbow Salmon,” we read:
Nothing ever happens how you want it to
Eating air
Breathing through disease and glucose
Ourselves a load of Pepto Bismol.
We are tricked out in sunlight and sorry for everything
The poems in Pacific Power & Light are comprised of strongly imagistic fragments that often reject formal syntax in favor of a staccato brevity. Normally, I think this approach leads to a feeling of sterility, but here it does something different. Across the poems, meaning is enigmatic while desire is lucid. There are very few lines in which readers can parse a pure idea, but the feeling that emerges is the pulse of memory. These are poems in which the inarticulable ache of nostalgia is left unarticulated, and they are all the better for it.
The rare moments of clarity are interruptions, and they often carry less weight than the lines that cannot be understood. It is as if the narrator suggests a kind of inversion—that “rational” thoughts are the ones that don’t make sense. For example, we read the following in the titular poem:
Milk teeth on the new fern did you see it? / I want to concentrate on you.
There are sections where humans feel more present, but it’s almost entirely to highlight their destructive impulse. The few references that are more overtly positive suggest either a kind of transience or similarity to the natural world. The beautiful is not that someone can behold a flower—it is that they can be like a flower.
Ultimately, the book culminates in a series of poems sharing the title “All Fucked Up,” and this is where we find the most explicit tension between the pleasures of nature and its destruction from humankind:
Over dogwoods
And Ketamine
No comply and the upper
Tributaries
Readers can choose celebration or self-destruction.
Pacific Power & Light is best accepted as a book you let wash over you, and by the end of the collection, I found myself wanting to experience nature the same way.
therealcubcake's review
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
2.75
I don't know how to refer to the poetry of "Pacific Power & Light" other than to say it is sensory poetry. You can smell, you can taste, you can feel Michael Dickmans words.
A reminder for so many that different things can, and do, in fact exist at the same time. This book feels blue collar, feels youthful, feels like growing up, feels like remembering childhood, feels like this world is broken, feels the pain of drug use, feels the homelessness that we don't talk about, feels like families and feels memories
bear_ridge_tarot's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
I love to read the works of authors who are from my region, and this one does not disappoint, The poetry flows smooth and swift. The local locations are scattered like breadcrumbs through the poems, in such a way that it doesn't distract from the images being built. My favorite lines were:
“Grandma Lion
Long fingers and long
Legs stretch out
For a drink in the goldenrod”
All in all, it was a good read.
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