Donald Revell

Donald Revell argues passionately for the transformation that imaginative experience elicits through poetry. "The art of poetry is not about the acquisition of wiles or the deployment of strategies," Revell writes. "Beginning in the senses, imagination senses farther, senses more." Using examples from his own poetry and translations and from Blake and Thoreau to Ronald Johnson and John Ashbery, Revell's The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye takes the writer beyond the workshop and into the world of vision.

“No poet so innovative now is more accessible, and no poet half so accessible in recent years has made the language so new.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Revell is a post-Romantic, his natural imagery clear and immediate, his feelings never very far from his sleeve, his tone approaching a prayerful devotion. . .” —Library Journal “These poems make you want to read them over and over, you want so much to understand their magic, their vastness. We suddenly have a master. God bless his courage, his knowledge, his playfulness, his stubbornness, his loving attention. God pity his grief.” —Gerald Stern

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.

“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

2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize Winner “In lines that are spare and strange, elegant and sorrowing, witty and linguistically innovative, My Mojave combines an Emersonian sweetness with postmodern practice. As part of a lyric experimental tradition, My Mojave is also balkily anti-lyric, interrupting its most flowing effects on purpose. Drawing on the terms of late modernist enterprise to re-invent and re-use poetic form as an indicator of consciousness, Revell brings to us descriptions of the natural world, songlike fragments, declarations that resemble riddles, and musings on poetry and the soul.” —Brenda Hillman, in her judges’ citation for the Lenore Marshall Prize “Revell is a writer of singular talent and ambition…he takes the reader to unfamiliar and strange places and, in the process, he creates some of the most beautiful poetry in our language.” —Harvard Review “A rich and rewarding read, My Mojave shows Revell to be an increasingly important poet for our times.” —The Antioch Review “Donald Revell’s work has changed restlessly from book to book, but its core remains beatific, a kind of poetic inner light.” —Poetry Flash “…My Mojave is at once fondly intimate and fondly adamant about its contents. What it assumes we shall assume. To the willing reader, it proffers large and small revelations.” —The Constant Critic “This is a great accomplishment of Revell’s voice in My Mojave; witnessing, he manages to help small details rise to their potential. Each moment of attention is rich and generative. Reading, we are taught—we feel—that ‘waters overplussed with pilgrim stutter’ do, indeed, ‘make more wilderness’ (‘The Government of Heaven’).” —Electronic Poetry Review “With My Mojave, Revell demonstrates the great art of when to write and when not to, of what to read and when. He writes a spiritual poetry that feels utterly truthful, giving us a phenomenology of spirit remarkably free of institutions and mostly free of habit. My Mojave will leave both those who have long followed Revell’s work and those new to the fold eager to read what’s next.” —Rain Taxi “This eighth book’s range now encompasses both open-ended sequences and songlike, stanzaic lyric, Christianity and ancient Greece, political anger and paternal affection…Revell’s deliberate drift and concise description distance his new work somewhat from the more difficult poets with whom he has lately been classed: this book instead recalls, and rivals, Gary Snyder’s Buddhist humility and Charles Wright’s luminous verse diaries.” —Publishers Weekly “America looks, to Revell, far worse, and Revell’s own private life far better, than either did when Revell began to write; his new poetry of prophetic statement sounds just as strange, just as rich in implication, as anything he—or almost any other poet of his generation—has done.” —The Nation “[In My Mojave,] The peace of nature is disturbed by a distant conflagration, by the rattling postures of stalled war….In tight, focused lines, Revell creates a delicate, exacting music, chimes and silences that hold you in their rhythm and explore the sad deserts we all live in.” —Library Journal

Donald Revell’s work, Arcady, draws its inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create a distinctly American poetic music. Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet’s intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet’s awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons’ passage and seasonal rituals. Revell’s sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives’s notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell’s words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.

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

“When history proves useless and consensus chimerical,” Donald Revell has written, “the poet’s necessity is invention, and this does a lot to explain our century’s preference for revision over mimesis.” For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: “The consolations of history are furtive,/ then fugitive, then forgotten.” Invoking such contemporary events as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, he seeks to integrate the political with the personal in a search for new paradigms of value and honor. from Google Books

In Donald Revell’s poems, the present is often little more than an instant caught between the sadness of memory and the need to face the future’s blank expanse. Even the best dreams recall happiness that cannot be retrieved, while the worst memories bend past love into a crazy line through darkness: "Anything can turn furious. The crazy / line through wreckage that wears my face and all / the faces seems not to end. And on the way, / even the most damaged things have one / surface glazed, a sudden distorting mirror / that I can’t help finding. There, I look as I did / stalled in hours or places it is shame / to remember. The Eumenides are slow / vengeance, meted out by anywhere love fails / in the collapse and angry dealing of self-love. / The light presses. The air presses hard and no / story of mine if good enough to hold out." When there is escape, calm in these poems it is often in thoughts of distant lands and pasts, in the works of other writers and artists—the bands of light and changing shadows of Cezanne’s canvases, the suburban desire and deep green lawns of Cheever’s fiction. It is art, stories, the urge to tell that brings hope in these lines.

“Every word counts in Donald Revell. You must read him carefully— not because he’s difficult but because he’s profound. But that’s too inappropriate, that word; let me say sun-worthy, Sophoclean, God-drenched. Let me say grave, trust-worthy, loving, faithful, shocking, brilliant, honest. Let me say for dear life. One of America’s best poets.” —Gerald Stern “Revell is one of American poetry’s quiet masters, an aesthetically daring poet who, late in his career, took up religious themes and has created a kind of edgy wisdom poetry. . . The best of these poems are transcendent.” —Publishers Weekly Previous Praise for Donald Revell: “No poet so innovative now is more accessible, and no poet half so accessible in recent years has made the language so new.” —Publishers Weekly “Revell is a post-Romantic, his natural imagery clear and immediate, his feelings never very far from his sleeve, his tone approaching a prayerful devotion.” —Library Journal