POETRY · 21ST CENTURY POETRY
Donald Revell
Most acclaimed
Invisible Green
2005
Invisible Green: Selected Prose begins with the series of nine essays published in American Poetry Review, essays which enact intimate and yet capacious converse with, and among, an array of writers. Quoted works become provocations for this poet's examination of language and humanness, an examination that disrupts our more comfortable notions while extending insights as to the nature and necessity of poetry. The elegant immediacy of Revell's prose belies the complex virtuosity he demonstrates in his manipulation of the essay's formal constraints as he incorporates the works of writers with whom we may well be familiar, but whose texts will become newly illuminated by the exchange. Besides this series, the collection includes eight more essays-their subjects range from lively considerations of the writings of Henry Thoreau, Pierre Reverdy, Ronald Johnson, John Ashbery and others, to more personal essays in which Revell examines the interrelationships between language and life, memory and culture, and how these impact upon the writing and reception of poetry. Donald Revell tells us "Poetry, the soul of poems, does not reside or rest in them. It goes. We follow." Revell's language-by turns lyrically meditative, demandingly direct, defiantly iconoclastic-draws his reader into a dynamic exchange about what it means to be a reader and writer in today's world.
Pennyweight Windows
2005
“Donald Revell’s selected poems, Pennyweight Windows, contains some of the most interesting American poems written in the last twenty years. Revell at his best is a writer of unusual intellectual rigor and great lyrical poignancy: his mind is tuned to adages and axioms, pre-Socratic mind-tricks and the gnomic observations of Thoreau; but he has a big, vulnerable heart that tries to live in our world among our entanglements.” —Poetry “The new poems, collected along with all the best of the old in Revell’s 2005 career-spanning volume, Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems…remind me of James Wright, of music by the Postal Service and Low, of the most beautiful diary in the world: Its desert-burnished gems await you now.” —City Pages “2005 Artists of the Year” Issue “To read this selection from Donald Revell’s 20-plus years of making poems is to witness the evolution of both an individual poet and the poetics of an entire era.” —Boston Review “Pennyweight Windows heralds a major reclamation: the right of a poet to be sincere. Revell’s achievement is in his acceptance of the risks of that sincerety. And this is the refreshing fact of these poems, all of them, as different as they are in form across the twenty years of their writing: they make no excuses for us, even in their essential humanity. They discern honestly human barbarism. But over that, they discern and express beauty—in nature, in humanity, and, yes, in God and the human quest to understand him.” —Speakeasy “It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell’s are so fresh, it’s as if he’s the first person ever to do it.” —TIME Magazine “For over twenty years, Donald Revell has used the pastoral as a tool of protest/revolution against violence and war and as a guide to peace, arguing for personal and political growth in precise, delicate lyrics. Includes a new group of poems, and much of the finest work from Revell’s eight previous collections. A major collection from “…an increasingly important poet for our times” (The Antioch Review). “Donald Revell’s spectacular new-and-selected amounts to three very good poetry books for the price of one—the first by a dejected urbanite who thinks he’s watching America, and his own private life, slowly collapse; one by a maker of puzzles, mazes, and spells; and one by an open-hearted, charitable, mystically inclined father, husband, and Christian believer who cherishes southern Nevada. I’d recommend any of those three on their own; the trio is irresistible.” —The Believer “PW said last year that Revell was due for a career retrospective, and this ample and almost shockingly varied cull of poems from eight books rewards that call richly.” —Publishers Weekly
Beautiful Shirt
1994
The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: “This is the world as I have known it./ It has a soft outline and is easily victimized.” Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities. from Google Books