Synopses & Reviews
Praise for Donald Revell:
No poet so innovative is more accessible, and no poet half so accessible in recent years has made the language so new.--Publishers Weekly, starred review
Acclaimed poet Donald Revell continues to avow devotion to the pastoral tradition in this pilgrimage through the mind's Eden. Joy and mortality instruct these poems, using nature to inform the spirit and assemble the dream of human happiness and unification.
From Lay of Wood:
I want celestial light, but not apocalyptic.
The end of the world is an old story.
I'm starting a new one.
Yellowbird here for one day only,
These emeralds are trees.
Fly fast.
Poet, translator, and critic Donald Revell has authored ten previous collections of poetry. Winner of the 2008 NEA Translation Award, the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Revell has also received fellowships from the NEA, Ingram Merrill, and John Simon Guggenheim memorial foundations. He is poetry editor of the Colorado Review.
Revell's eleventh collection courageously seeks enlightenment and the ethereal, crafting a world where environment informs action.
Review
"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
"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
"What I find both moving and fresh about this collection is that it handles its subject matter with a simultaneous severity and lightness
This balance keeps the work buoyant despite its deep subject matter.”CutBank
...Revell, a talented poet and translator, has finally crossed the line from strange lyricism into full-blown ecstatic prophecy
This book topped my nominations for a Nation Book Critics Circle award nod.”Sacramento News and Review
Donald Revell's eleventh book is a collection of the crisp, intense poems for which he is known. The poems face the metaphysical and the religious head-on while leaving the reader with a feeling of new vision and open meditation"Poets.org
"Sincerity is risky. In an age that seems averse to that risk, these poems are welcome company."Chicago Review
"Revells recent collections form a steady progression toward the spiritual, and this latest offering is the most thoughtful, most moving, of them all."Library Journal
"As a redoubt against mortality, The Bitter Withy maintains a vigilance toward the seen and an acceptance of the belated nature of understanding, a tenacity for things on the brink of vanishing..."Pleiades
Synopsis
Donald Revell's eleventh collection courageously seeks enlightenment and the ethereal, crafting a world where environment informs action.
Synopsis
Acclaimed poet Donald Revell continues to avow devotion to the pastoral tradition in this pilgrimage through the mind's Eden. Joy and mortality instruct these poems, using nature to inform the spirit and assemble the dream of human happiness and unification.
About the Author
Donald Revell is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A THIEF OF STRINGS is his tenth poetry collection, published by Alice James. Twice winner of the PEN Center 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 granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Donald Revell's previous translations include A SEASON IN HELL by Arthur Rimbaud (Omnidawn 2007), which won the PEN USA Translation Award. He has also translated The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems by Guillame Apollinaire, and Alcools: Poems by Guillame Apollinaire, both published by Wesleyan University Press. His books of essays include INVISIBLE GREEN: SELECTED PROSE, published by Omnidawn. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell lives in the desert south of Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children Benjamin Brecht and Lucie Ming.