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A celebrated poet struggles with the century's events
"When history proves useless and consensus chimerical," Donald Revell has written, "the poet's necessity is invention, and this does a lot to explain our century's preference for revision over mimesis." For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: "The consolations of history are furtive,/ then fugitive, then forgotten." Invoking such contemporary events as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, he seeks to integrate the political with the personal in a search for new paradigms of value and honor.
DONALD REVELL was a National Poetry Series winner in 1982 for his book of poems, From the Abandoned Cities, and won a Pushcart Prize in 1985. His most recent collection, New Dark Ages (1990), won the PEN Center USA West Award for Poetry. He teaches English at the University of Denver.
"In Donald Revell's haunting new collection, the momentous political changes of the last few years rumble like aftershocks. Yet through the erasure the old life, life as we know it, continues to gleam, desperately, winningly."
~John Ashbery
"In his astonishing and sobering new volume, Erasures, Donald Revell strips bare the fleshy veneer of culture to reveal the machinery of terror and history of oppression beneath."
~David St. John
"In Revell's haunting new collection, the momentous political changes of the last few years rumble like aftershocks. Yet through the erasures the old life, life as we know it, continues to gleam, desperately, winningly—John Ashbery. Erasures is rare among collections of poetry today in being first and foremost, genuinely moving"
~Marjorie Perloff