It Was Fever That Made the World

by Jim Powell and Jim Powell

This sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertius, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology.
"I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. . . . It is perhaps here that Jim Powell, not yet forty, most shows his superiority to many of his contemporaries and seniors. He not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and so we grasp it as we read. . . . he has tapped a subject matter that is endless and important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything."--Thom Gunn, Shelf Life

"His title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memory, destruction, and grief. . . . Page for page, there is more sheer fine, clear, yet syntactically subtle and metaphorically gorgeous writing in Powell than I have seen in some time."--Mary Kinzie, Poetry

"Jim Powell's poems, like those of Thomas Hardy, are haunted forms, full of ghosts and mocking gods, shadows and foreshadowings. But Powell is a Hardy whose poems we've never read, a Hardy with his hand in the blaze, not stirring the ash in a cold and wind-torn grate."--Jennifer Clarvoe, The Threepenny Review

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226677079
• ISBN13: 9780226677071
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

I love it

I had read it for many times, and I could find something new every time I read.

Searing, powerful, perfect.

This is my favorite volume of poetry. He writes with the fire and heat he praises. The poetry crackles and burns the whole way through. My fingers and eyes have been singed by his feverish words. While I am not as versed in the classical imagery he summons, the work is nonetheless powerful and accessible. His poems written in the form of letters to friends, lovers, relatives are particularly affecting. But above all his writing burns and reminds me of the fever I live with every day, of the immedicacy and hot thrill of being alive. He argues that "recalcitrance to change" may slowly wear us down, and that the battering of ourselves against rocks shooting downstream in dangerous rapids can preserve us... This makes sense to me. I could recommend no other text so highly