Drought-Adapted Vine

Donald Revell writes with a drunken equipoise among the weedy flowers and bees of roadside museums and vacant churches. . . . Here] are poems that border the hereafter and revive the child's play of prophecy. What miraculous assistance they provide --Dean Young

Donald Revell pushes boundaries between words and music, transcending our current notion of beauty and innocence. Personal memory, the visionary, the eccentric, and the divine intertwine between networks of stories that connect past and present through paint strokes, composition, and pastoral lyric. Pure of heart poems lie down in a vibrant field of paradox, basking gratefully in the sun of unknowing.

From Beyond Disappointment:

Hence and farewell valediction: life's journey.
It makes no sense. The children mock us with it.
A typewriter beneath the Christmas tree
Calls to the icecaps. Illustrated monthlies
Burn in the wasps' burnt nest. It is
Such perfections make the sun to rise.

Donald Revell has authored eleven collections of poetry, most recently Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN 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 awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell is the director of graduate studies and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.


Author: Donald Revell
Publisher: Alice James Books
Published: 09/01/2015
Pages: 100
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.30w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781938584138


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/20/2015
Library Journal 09/15/2015 pg. 82

About the Author
Born in The Bronx, New York in 1954, Donald Revell was educated at Harpur College (B.A. 1975) and the University of Buffalo (Ph.D. 1980). He is the author of eleven previous collections of poetry, most recently of Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009), both from Alice James Books. Revell has published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire's Alcools (Wesleyan), Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn), Laforgue's Last Verses (Omnidawn) and Verlaine's Songs without Words (Omnidawn). His critical writings have been collected as The Art of Attention (Graywolf) and Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN 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 awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell is Director of Graduate Studies & Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan and their children, Benjamin and Lucie, in the Spring Mountains of Nevada.