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- New Dark Ages
Evocative poems about the most simple and complicated ideas.
Winner of the Pen Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry (1990)
New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality – adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as :If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful – a true vindication of humanism?"
DONALD REVELL grew up in the South Bronx, "a desolate and frightening locale for which I still have a deep, almost erotic affection but which also made me feel a political and social anger." Many of his poems are about this childhood and the refuge he found in the beauty and music of a Bronx Episcopalian church. From the Abandoned Cities was a National Poetry Series winner in 1982. He won a Pushcart Prize in 1985, and a NEA fellowship in 1988, and wrote The Gaza of Winter(1988). He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Denver.
"A stunning and troubling collection. The prophetic voices in these dazzling poems are honeycombed with wisdom and sorrow, they seem the voices we hear in those few dreams we still dare, even if those dreams remain edged by nightmare. This book holds urgent lessons in histories that are both public and personal, lived and imagined. The haunting, abstract lyricism of New Dark Ages is lit by a filament of rage against our seeming powerlessness in those landscapes webbed with political and intimate intrigues. This remarkable book might well become our hymnal for the 21st Century."
~David St. John
"I am deeply moved by these poems . . . I like the deep seriousness, the intelligence, the lovely music, the freshness, the zaniness. It is very mature poetry and it is poetry that has grounded itself in such a manner that it will continue to develop and progress"
~Gerald Stern. Pen Center USA West Poetry Prize.
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