Drought-Adapted Vine
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"Donald Revell writes with a drunken equipoise among the weedy flowers and bees of roadside museums and vacant churches. . . .[Here] are poems that border the hereafter and revive the child's play of prophecy. What miraculous assistance they provide!"—Dean Young
Donald Revell pushes boundaries between words and music, transcending our current notion of beauty and innocence. Personal memory, the visionary, the eccentric, and the divine intertwine between networks of stories that connect past and present through paint strokes, composition, and pastoral lyric. Pure of heart poems lie down in a vibrant field of paradox, basking gratefully in the sun of unknowing.
From "Beyond Disappointment":
Hence and farewell valediction: "life's journey."
It makes no sense. The children mock us with it.
A typewriter beneath the Christmas tree
Calls to the icecaps. Illustrated monthlies
Burn in the wasps' burnt nest. It is
Such perfections make the sun to rise.
Donald Revell has authored eleven collections of poetry, most recently Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell is the director of graduate studies and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ecstatic and eminent, reverent and much-revered, Revell (Essay: A Critical Memoir) continues his rapturous and challenging attention to the presence of divinity in nature, and to the reminders of death in daily life. In his visions, he takes opposites such as grief and worship, or transcendence and emptiness and turns them into complements: "The day is mountains, too many mountains," yet "flowers are never out of place,/ Never wrong." Revell's unrhymed sonnets, his paradoxical verse prayers, and his central sequence (which has no standard form) also amount to an elegy for his mother, whose funeral recurs among his images of flowering trees, "forsythia/ Starry for hopeful, root and branch." The poet, editor, and translator now looks hardest and longest at places and things from back East, from his childhood: "Steeple that buried my parents/ Under the hill was a staircase too." Like one of his conscious influences, Henry David Thoreau, Revell demonstrates his spontaneity and his unmediated, often delighted, relationship to nature even while he teaches us, unshowily, about who and what he has read. Yet the stars in this volume are not the older writers he quotes or references, but the boldly sketched scenes, animals, trees, and buildings; each is a momentary conjunction of faith with language, addressed with a pellucid power that invites even unprepared readers to join in.
