Invisible Green

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.