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In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver
A new collection of poetry by Dannye Romine Powell remains cause for celebration; and her latest, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver , underscores her abiding reputation as a poet of breathtaking candor and precision, the consummate craftswoman, who painstakingly parses syllables into words as if sifting for gold. These yearning, often prayerful, poems are laced with shimmer, incandescence—sometimes blinding—moments of recognition and epiphany that inform every chiseled line Powell commits to paper. Above all, her work is intricately exacting. She gets things the truth, the light, how we say things, how we don’t say things, the nuanced choreography of imperceptibly monumental moments. Yet, make no the poet desists sentimentality, as she does so fiercely at every turn in this amazingly beautiful and courageous volume. This is a very important book by a very important poet at the summit of her powers. —Joseph Bathanti
78 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2020
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February 19, 2026
I am fascinated by the books that make themselves known to us. The ones that jump off of shelves to land us on, the ones that people keep mentioning to us, the ones that keep appearing in our feed. This is one of those books, for me, for sure. I swear, no matter how many times I ignored this poetry collection, it kept appearing and making its presence known.
All I really needed to know was that the poet herself was a devout reader of Ray Carver’s poetry. Duh! Obviously we were going to be kindred spirits.
But, when I finally bought the book this weekend, I discovered that the poet (just a few years older than my parents) was also born in the Miami area and then relocated to North Carolina.
And. . . despite not being a drinker herself, she was the daughter of an alcoholic and the mother of one.
I’m not the mother of an alcoholic (thank God), and I’m not a drinker, but I am the daughter of alcoholic parents, and the gnarly waves of alcoholism have washed right over my family of origin for multiple generations.
It’s not a coincidence that this poet, Dannye Romine Powell, begins this work of poetry with a reference made to Ray Carver, another poet for whom alcoholism played a major role.
Ms. Powell, who was a poet, a journalist, and a columnist (and who passed away in 2024), must have had steel in her veins.
From what I can gather from her poetry, she and her husband lost a daughter, then their marriage fell apart, then their son’s life was destroyed by his alcoholism.
Her pain, disappointment (and perpetual hope) are palpable:
Had we seen you stumble
up the front walk, promises
drifting from your pockets
like lottery tickets,
we would have merely cracked
the door, allowing in nothing
but air.
Or so we like to believe.
Now you are gone again
and I imagine you somewhere
out there, propped
against a building,
your shadow long and lean,
or in the woods huddled deep
in your coat. It’s always dark
where you are. It’s always cold.
All night I watch the moon
try to follow you home.
Yet, despite the major themes of grief throughout, this is a strangely buoyant collection. I didn’t wither from it; I felt, rather, that I sat up straighter in my seat, felt like I was capable of a rebound.
I read the whole collection once, then opened it up and read it again. It’s a keeper.
I’m sorry that Ms. Powell is no longer with us. Here she was, a North Carolina poet, and I didn’t know her work until now. Luckily that doesn't stop me from being a new fan!
I leave you with my favorite:
Poem for an Old Miami Boyfriend
Because I won’t be there when he dies,
ask if he remembers
the banyan tree, its roots
braving the air
for something beyond reach.
Ask if he remembers
the thin wash of tide teasing
our feet in the early cove
of morning. The purple streaks
of sky after rain,
gray rooftops glazed with blue.
Ask if he remembers
the texture of flesh
in the warm breath of dark,
all the sad clocks calling us home.
Hold the cup to his lips. Hold his hand.
Because I won’t be there
when he dies, ask if he remembers
how true the little worn boat,
its wild bluster.
All I really needed to know was that the poet herself was a devout reader of Ray Carver’s poetry. Duh! Obviously we were going to be kindred spirits.
But, when I finally bought the book this weekend, I discovered that the poet (just a few years older than my parents) was also born in the Miami area and then relocated to North Carolina.
And. . . despite not being a drinker herself, she was the daughter of an alcoholic and the mother of one.
I’m not the mother of an alcoholic (thank God), and I’m not a drinker, but I am the daughter of alcoholic parents, and the gnarly waves of alcoholism have washed right over my family of origin for multiple generations.
It’s not a coincidence that this poet, Dannye Romine Powell, begins this work of poetry with a reference made to Ray Carver, another poet for whom alcoholism played a major role.
Ms. Powell, who was a poet, a journalist, and a columnist (and who passed away in 2024), must have had steel in her veins.
From what I can gather from her poetry, she and her husband lost a daughter, then their marriage fell apart, then their son’s life was destroyed by his alcoholism.
Her pain, disappointment (and perpetual hope) are palpable:
Had we seen you stumble
up the front walk, promises
drifting from your pockets
like lottery tickets,
we would have merely cracked
the door, allowing in nothing
but air.
Or so we like to believe.
Now you are gone again
and I imagine you somewhere
out there, propped
against a building,
your shadow long and lean,
or in the woods huddled deep
in your coat. It’s always dark
where you are. It’s always cold.
All night I watch the moon
try to follow you home.
Yet, despite the major themes of grief throughout, this is a strangely buoyant collection. I didn’t wither from it; I felt, rather, that I sat up straighter in my seat, felt like I was capable of a rebound.
I read the whole collection once, then opened it up and read it again. It’s a keeper.
I’m sorry that Ms. Powell is no longer with us. Here she was, a North Carolina poet, and I didn’t know her work until now. Luckily that doesn't stop me from being a new fan!
I leave you with my favorite:
Poem for an Old Miami Boyfriend
Because I won’t be there when he dies,
ask if he remembers
the banyan tree, its roots
braving the air
for something beyond reach.
Ask if he remembers
the thin wash of tide teasing
our feet in the early cove
of morning. The purple streaks
of sky after rain,
gray rooftops glazed with blue.
Ask if he remembers
the texture of flesh
in the warm breath of dark,
all the sad clocks calling us home.
Hold the cup to his lips. Hold his hand.
Because I won’t be there
when he dies, ask if he remembers
how true the little worn boat,
its wild bluster.
Read
March 11, 20267/10
I picked up this little book with real anticipation, based largely on Julie G's fabulous review. The title alone would have sold it. It promises a kind of quiet literary companionship, and the collection moves through the emotional terrain most of us eventually have to face—family, memory, aging, love, loss. Powell writes about serious things: alcoholism, the death of a daughter, the collapse of a marriage. This is not small material. You can feel that these poems are forged in hard experience.
And maybe that’s why my reaction surprised me a little. I could see the emotions clearly enough; I could recognize their sincerity. But I often found myself wishing the language would push further—either break the surface of those experiences or plunge more deeply into them. The poems frequently remain calm and restrained, almost careful, when the lives behind them suggest something far more turbulent.
I say this less as criticism than as a kind of frustrated admiration, because you can feel the weight of those experiences just beneath the lines. The poems are circling something powerful.
When Powell anchors a poem in a very specific human moment, everything suddenly sharpens. “We Took You In” is quietly devastating: parents take back an alcoholic son after promising themselves—firmly, painfully—never again. The emotional tension in that decision gives the poem real gravity. And “Poem for an Old Miami Boyfriend” works beautifully for a similar reason. It feels more personal, more grounded in a particular memory, and the poem suddenly breathes.
Those poems show what Powell can do when experience presses directly against the language. I only found myself wishing that same intensity surfaced more often throughout the collection—because the life behind these poems clearly contains it.
Even so, Powell’s willingness to face the difficult truths of a life—addiction, loss, broken love—gives the book a quiet honesty that stays with you.
We Took You In
Had we seen you stumble
up the front walk, promises
drifting from your pockets
like lottery tickets,
we would have merely cracked
the door, allowing in nothing
but air
Or so we like to believe.
Now you are gone again
and I imagine you somewhere
out there, propped
against a building,
your shadow long and lean,
or in the woods huddled deep
in your coat. It's always dark
where you are. It's always cold.
All night I watch the moon
try to follow you home.
I picked up this little book with real anticipation, based largely on Julie G's fabulous review. The title alone would have sold it. It promises a kind of quiet literary companionship, and the collection moves through the emotional terrain most of us eventually have to face—family, memory, aging, love, loss. Powell writes about serious things: alcoholism, the death of a daughter, the collapse of a marriage. This is not small material. You can feel that these poems are forged in hard experience.
And maybe that’s why my reaction surprised me a little. I could see the emotions clearly enough; I could recognize their sincerity. But I often found myself wishing the language would push further—either break the surface of those experiences or plunge more deeply into them. The poems frequently remain calm and restrained, almost careful, when the lives behind them suggest something far more turbulent.
I say this less as criticism than as a kind of frustrated admiration, because you can feel the weight of those experiences just beneath the lines. The poems are circling something powerful.
When Powell anchors a poem in a very specific human moment, everything suddenly sharpens. “We Took You In” is quietly devastating: parents take back an alcoholic son after promising themselves—firmly, painfully—never again. The emotional tension in that decision gives the poem real gravity. And “Poem for an Old Miami Boyfriend” works beautifully for a similar reason. It feels more personal, more grounded in a particular memory, and the poem suddenly breathes.
Those poems show what Powell can do when experience presses directly against the language. I only found myself wishing that same intensity surfaced more often throughout the collection—because the life behind these poems clearly contains it.
Even so, Powell’s willingness to face the difficult truths of a life—addiction, loss, broken love—gives the book a quiet honesty that stays with you.
We Took You In
Had we seen you stumble
up the front walk, promises
drifting from your pockets
like lottery tickets,
we would have merely cracked
the door, allowing in nothing
but air
Or so we like to believe.
Now you are gone again
and I imagine you somewhere
out there, propped
against a building,
your shadow long and lean,
or in the woods huddled deep
in your coat. It's always dark
where you are. It's always cold.
All night I watch the moon
try to follow you home.
October 12, 2020
I read this for my American Literature class and we were supposed to track the poems all the way through as a narrative. It is one of heartbreak and devastation, but also one of hope and growth.
"as if we never were."
"as if we never were."
October 27, 2020
Emily Dickinson for Our time: Dannye Romine Powell
In her poem “Hope is a thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson remarks the tenacity of hope in the human breast despite all lack of encouragement.
In her most recent collection of poems, "In The Sunroom With Raymond Carver," the North Carolina poet Dannye Romine Powell examines that mysterious persistence of hope and of the love that feeds it, even when all experience and Mortality itself urge caution, send the flashing neon word BEWARE in the shape of a shattered marriage here, a death there, the bottle discovered in the trash of the supposedly recovering drunk, the child’s not-so-idle question that shatters a life’s smooth surface.
Like Dickinson, Powell’s terrain is the domestic life, closely examined. For that is where the terrors lie, right alongside the joys, the fears, the sun-soaked days between:
The News Reaches Me
“Stones waver in the shallows
Of the Natahala River,
a cathedral of trees
on the far bank.
A green morning
if there ever was.
A car screeches, teeters
on the edge
of the old bridge,
plunges into the water.
Sudden leaf shudder
birds flung into the air,
all the wild darting and flapping.”
The news of a mother’s death, of an alcoholic son’s backpack found in the woods and turned in to law officials---all the losses that interrupt the safe routines of our lives: that’s where the drama and meaning in life lies, and Powell knows it. The poet’s spare lines, her fine sense of metaphor, her idiomatic language, and her unwavering eye capture those crystalline moments of human experience, yielding epiphanies and understanding. Take this one, for instance.
For an Eight-Year-Old-Grandson Whose Parents Recently Separated
He believes
If we dig deep enough
where we are weeding
around the rose bushes,
we might unearth a path
that belonged to a farm family back
in the 1800’s, a family that kept cows
in the barn and maybe a few chickens.
Dig deep enough, he says, and we might even find
The house where the mom scrambled eggs
Every day while the dad sat with the news.
The whole family woke up dead
One morning, he tells me¬¬—mom, dad
And their boy—and maybe if we get real lucky,
If we dig really deep, we might find
the holes where the bullets went in.
And what does one do to get things right? In “This Dream Is a Winter Dream,” the speaker describes a dream in which
“you wind through familiar corridors,
as if to a wedding, someone
you have loved for years
waiting. As usual,
you manage to skirt the edge of pleasure
…..singe the gossamer veil.
The trick is to dream
this dream again and again.
Dream it until it rights itself,
until it floats you
through its halls, a silver leaf.”
The reward for such tenacity is the subject of this poem
Morning Lit the Daffodils
In the glass vase on the low table
They appear made of raw silk stitched
And crimped. I call my husband in to look—
Oh, how beautiful! He says—this husband,
Who, when we married forty years ago,
Didn’t know the name of daffodils
Or any other flower and said he didn’t care
To know. Since then, so many things
We never predicted—I’ll spare you
The list—I only want to say
That every time life surprised,
Or thrilled or unleashed,
It did something else as well —eased
Into our lives a radiance, yellow on yellow frill.
The finest and the toughest poem in the collection is the one that closes the collection, “In the Night, The Wind in the leaves.” It is a milestone in the poet’s development. But I’ll let readers discover it for themselves.
In age, the poet Wordsworth, who had as a boy had had to throw his arms around to a tree to steady his sense of joy in the natural world, lamented his loss of that sense of immanence, “of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.” His consolation---and he knew it was sorry when it offered it---was “the philosophic mind.” Danny Romine Powell has remained alert to the splendor and the fire of our human moments on this earth, as this fine volume attests. That she pulled this off is a testimony to her gift and art.
This book is highly accessible to all readers, however prosaic their tastes may be. It would make a fine introduction to poetry for the person who thinks he doesn’t like poetry. And for the reader of poetry, it will prove a a book to which he returns again and again.
In her poem “Hope is a thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson remarks the tenacity of hope in the human breast despite all lack of encouragement.
In her most recent collection of poems, "In The Sunroom With Raymond Carver," the North Carolina poet Dannye Romine Powell examines that mysterious persistence of hope and of the love that feeds it, even when all experience and Mortality itself urge caution, send the flashing neon word BEWARE in the shape of a shattered marriage here, a death there, the bottle discovered in the trash of the supposedly recovering drunk, the child’s not-so-idle question that shatters a life’s smooth surface.
Like Dickinson, Powell’s terrain is the domestic life, closely examined. For that is where the terrors lie, right alongside the joys, the fears, the sun-soaked days between:
The News Reaches Me
“Stones waver in the shallows
Of the Natahala River,
a cathedral of trees
on the far bank.
A green morning
if there ever was.
A car screeches, teeters
on the edge
of the old bridge,
plunges into the water.
Sudden leaf shudder
birds flung into the air,
all the wild darting and flapping.”
The news of a mother’s death, of an alcoholic son’s backpack found in the woods and turned in to law officials---all the losses that interrupt the safe routines of our lives: that’s where the drama and meaning in life lies, and Powell knows it. The poet’s spare lines, her fine sense of metaphor, her idiomatic language, and her unwavering eye capture those crystalline moments of human experience, yielding epiphanies and understanding. Take this one, for instance.
For an Eight-Year-Old-Grandson Whose Parents Recently Separated
He believes
If we dig deep enough
where we are weeding
around the rose bushes,
we might unearth a path
that belonged to a farm family back
in the 1800’s, a family that kept cows
in the barn and maybe a few chickens.
Dig deep enough, he says, and we might even find
The house where the mom scrambled eggs
Every day while the dad sat with the news.
The whole family woke up dead
One morning, he tells me¬¬—mom, dad
And their boy—and maybe if we get real lucky,
If we dig really deep, we might find
the holes where the bullets went in.
And what does one do to get things right? In “This Dream Is a Winter Dream,” the speaker describes a dream in which
“you wind through familiar corridors,
as if to a wedding, someone
you have loved for years
waiting. As usual,
you manage to skirt the edge of pleasure
…..singe the gossamer veil.
The trick is to dream
this dream again and again.
Dream it until it rights itself,
until it floats you
through its halls, a silver leaf.”
The reward for such tenacity is the subject of this poem
Morning Lit the Daffodils
In the glass vase on the low table
They appear made of raw silk stitched
And crimped. I call my husband in to look—
Oh, how beautiful! He says—this husband,
Who, when we married forty years ago,
Didn’t know the name of daffodils
Or any other flower and said he didn’t care
To know. Since then, so many things
We never predicted—I’ll spare you
The list—I only want to say
That every time life surprised,
Or thrilled or unleashed,
It did something else as well —eased
Into our lives a radiance, yellow on yellow frill.
The finest and the toughest poem in the collection is the one that closes the collection, “In the Night, The Wind in the leaves.” It is a milestone in the poet’s development. But I’ll let readers discover it for themselves.
In age, the poet Wordsworth, who had as a boy had had to throw his arms around to a tree to steady his sense of joy in the natural world, lamented his loss of that sense of immanence, “of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.” His consolation---and he knew it was sorry when it offered it---was “the philosophic mind.” Danny Romine Powell has remained alert to the splendor and the fire of our human moments on this earth, as this fine volume attests. That she pulled this off is a testimony to her gift and art.
This book is highly accessible to all readers, however prosaic their tastes may be. It would make a fine introduction to poetry for the person who thinks he doesn’t like poetry. And for the reader of poetry, it will prove a a book to which he returns again and again.
December 26, 2021
I devoured this book like a dish of Hagan Dazs ice Cream. Oh, my how delicious her writing! How poignant and heart stopping without being sentimental. That take talent, or more correctly, I should say that takes years of honing your craft, which Dannye Romine Powell has done to perfection. I highly recommend this book!!!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews