- Home
- Wesleyan Poetry Series
- poetry
- There Are Three
Poems from the indestructible wilderness of American words and silences.
Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul." These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.
A Branch of the Discipline
Overthrow
Upon Diagnosis
Inquire
Societies Can Be Improved. Societies Cannot Be Good.
Homage to Mrs. Jane Lead
Elegy
Above
My Father
There are Three
To the Lord Protector
A Cold September
A New October
Extinction
Thanksgiving for a Son
Advent
A Clasp
Once Divided
Scherzo
Fewer Than Music
The Memory of New England
Hypethral
A Day of Crisis No a Quiet Day
Outbreak
No Difference I know They Are.
DONALD REVELL was a National Poetry Series Winner in 1982 for his first book of poems, From Abandoned Cities (1983). In 1985 he won a Pushcart Prize. His collection New Dark Ages (Wesleyan 1990) won the PEN Center USA West Award for Poetry. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. His other books include Erasures (Wesleyan, 1992), and Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan, 1994); he also translated a volume of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, entitled Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995).
"Revell is important for his linkage of a mainstream lyric style with the sensibility of the experimental subversive, purposefully marginal Language text . . . He's associative as Ashbery, inventive as Creeley, but he is his own poet, original and solemn."
~Poetry
"Songs for the living, songs for the dead, shadowed by those voices echoing through the streets of that (absent) City on a Hill. The impossible, unanswerable question of grace, redemption, reprieve drives Revell's poems toward a pitch, and a grace, not often attained in our time. The urgency of their appeal lingers in the mind long after the page has been turned."
~Michael Palmer
""The listening reader experiences an echo chamber of implosive power, terse declarations of concentrated insight teased into sestina-like stanzas of recontextualized word populations. In Beautiful Shirt, Revell juxtaposes a vocabulary of moral concern against an exploratory syntax that sets meaning free . . . [His] feverish technique works at full tilt in the service of an astonishingly fecund imagination.""
~American Letters and Commentary
""Revell is important for his linkage of a mainstream lyric style with the sensibility of the experimental subversive, purposefully marginal Language text . . . He's associative as Ashbery, inventive as Creeley, but he is his own poet, original and solemn.""
~Poetry
""This is a poetry of often blunt, gnomic statements, but also an abundance of thought and dazzling wordplay: labor over it, and you'll be rewarded.""
~Publishers Weekly