IMPERMANENCE by Ren Powell, reviewed by Henry Stanton

We are guided through Ren Powell’s spare and resonating book of poetry by a Virgil of sorts.  Though the bust scribbled with the author’s poetry is ostensibly inanimate, it is, in fact, alive and invigorated, like the book, with the power of poetic utterance.  While the bust is alive, it is still a shade to the reader, as Virgil ultimately was to Dante – a visitor from that other world with who we can dialog but who ultimately moves in mysterious, wondrous and evasive ways.   We travel from one sacred ecosystem to the next, where we are introduced to a locus of insight by the appearance of the bust-in-place and by the revelations of the poetry.  Our guide through the book chaperones us through some exquisitely beautiful poetry – spare and understated, quiet sometimes silent and wordless, always vibrating with soft-spoken intensity.

This is such a neat trick.

By trick, I mean nothing like gimmick.  I am speaking of the trick of the coyote, the shaman, the artist.  Ren Powell deftly disorients us and astonishes us and reveals the subliminal and universal to us so that, at the end of the book, we have no clear sense of where we have been and how we got here.  Impermanence, with all its ramifications of “fleeting, disappearing, lost” in the deepest sense is also a referral to the eternal and infinite.  This book is so beautiful because it offers us poetry that is intimate and relevant in the most immediate way of being human.  Here it is exquisite, important and now it is gone.   And, here we find offered to us timeless understanding, the experience of rich organic beauty, a trip into the unknown source from where beautiful poetry emerges. 

From renpowell.com:

This project began with meditation on the idea of impermanence. And with this image, with the body-as-story slowly losing shape. With our narratives falling apart, becoming loose elements that can/will be rearranged in another story. Which is what history is, after all.

The bust was made of plaster and paper mache (using my handwritten poems for the project ripped into strips). I photographed the bust in various locations in the Jæren landscape of Norway. It was supposed to break up slowly in the waterfall during filming. However, it was taken by the current and slipped under an old mill house - trapped by the torrent of water, the wooden beams, and the rocks.

But this is what happens when we try to plan our stories. Isn’t it? Everything falls apart. That’s the way of things.

A Mad Orphan Lit. Publication
A Conceptual Multimedia Artwork:
42 Poems
Plaster/paper mache bust (video) and photography
Acrylic Monoprints

Moroccan handmade paper (hardcover)
Double-Needle Coptic Stitching
(note: this intentionally loose stitch allows for an open-back and “lay flat” binding)
15 X 20 cm, 60 pages
Text block: 160gsm acid-free, ethically resourced paper

120 EURO Limited series of 10

Buy the Print on Demand paperback HERE.

Ren Powell is a writer and teaching artist. She is a native Californian – now a Norwegian citizen settled on the west coast of Norway.  Shas been a member of The Norwegian Author’s Union since 2005 and has published six full-length collections of poetry and more than two dozen books of translations with traditional publishing houses. Her sixth poetry collection The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along was published in 2017 by Wigestrand forlag. Her poetry collections have been purchased by the Norwegian Arts Council for national library distribution, and her poems have been translated and published in eight languages.