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.
