Synopses & Reviews
Donald Revell’s eighth collection, My Mojave, concerns itself with beauty, with the way in which the divine pours through the eye and into the soul. The poems seek their gods in that place where the natural and human worlds come together, where "miserable cardinals comfort/The broken seesaws/And me who wants no comfort/Only to believe." With tightly crafted, sensual lines, the poems are keenly aware of the deserts we inhabit, all the while marveling at the effortlessness of poetry and worship in a world so magnificently capable of proliferating itself and its beauty.
Short Fantasia
The plane descending from an empty sky
Onto numberless real stars
Makes a change in heaven, a new
Pattern for the ply of spirits on bodies.
We are here. Sounds press our bones down.
Someone standing recognizes someone else.
We have no insides. All the books
Are written on the steel beams of bridges.
Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoes
With a brown leaf. I stand, and I read again
The story of Aeneas escaping the fires
And his wife’s ghost. We shall meet again
At a tree outside the city. We shall make
New sounds and leave our throats in that place.
Praise for Donald Revell’s There Are Three:
"The touch throughout is extraordinarily refined, the -language trimmed and delicate beyond praise. It’s almost as terrible and pure as Bach’s music for solo violin, so to speak, deep into the strings. . . ."—Calvin Bedient, The Denver Quarterly
"There Are Three is a grave and compelling book, the kind which demands rereading."—Poetry
Synopsis
Pastoral and devotional, this renowned author's eighth collection concerns itself with beauty and the deserts we inhabit.
Synopsis
Poetry. Donald Revell's eighth collection, MY MOJAVE, concerns itself with beauty, with the way in which the divine pours through the eye and into the soul. Pastoral and devotional, the poems seek their gods in that place where the natural and human worlds come together, where "miserable cardinals comfort/ The broken seesaws/ And me who wants no comfort/ Only to believe." With tightly crafted, sensual lines, the poems are keenly aware of the deserts we inhabit, all the while marveling at the effortlessness of poetry and worship in a world so magnificantly capable of proliferating itself and its beauty.
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.