Arcady (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Donald Revell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series | Publication Date: February 15, 2002

A musical desert elegy on life born from loss.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This latest and strongest volume from the increasingly influential Revell (There Are Three) began, as his preface explains, with the death of his sister. Its cryptic, stark, incantatory short-lined sonnets and sonnet-sized stanzaic lyrics take in pre-Socratic philosophers, hymns, nursery rhymes, TV cartoons ("tooms") and the literary ancestry of pastoral genres while remaining close to Revell's own loss. Revell juxtaposes the grief he continues to feel with Virgilian shepherds and journeys, with other deaths (those of Allen Ginsberg, the puppeteer Shari Lewis), even with orchestration: "The sympathy of friends is pleasant VIOLINS But it makes no difference anymore TROMBONES." His clipped stanzas can sound like stage directions, or like notes for still-unwritten poems. At the same time they can grab the ear and hold on "It dies away Very quickly My father's Harp struck." "Shall We be there For keeps for Us," he asks in "The Little River Wants to Kee," whose quizzical title implies both "keen" and "keep." Acknowledged influences include Thoreau and Poussin (whose best-known painting includes the motto "Et in Arcadia Ego"); readers may also recall the terse, mystical lines of Michael Palmer or the typographical experiments of Apollinaire, the French modernist whom Revell (who teaches at the University of Utah) has translated. Revell's previous work has struck some readers as inspiringly strange, while seeming to others arid or unmusical. In his new poems, though, each verbal venture emerges from, and returns to, events in the soul: "After gods go Over the moon I'll catch you."

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Komunyakaa is a witness to historyAbut that pat description hardly does justice to the richness and power of his poems. Moving from a prehistoric cave to "a dead child/ on the floor between its mother/ and four slavecatchers" to a summer's night in Hanoi, the poet manages to give us "a rare glimpse into the terrible fire of experience" (LJ 6/1/98).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (February 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819563315
• ISBN-13: 978-0819563316
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,859,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the most original poets out there, September 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Thieves of Paradise (Hardcover)

I had known of Komunyakaa for a while, but only recently began reading him. I'm glad I did. This is a book full of very different types of poems--some with regular stanza lengths, some with numbered sections, some short and without stanzas--and it is consistently excellent throughout. I think many poets tend to repeat themselves, but Komunyakaa seems to be one of the most courageous and technically sound poets there is. He is known for his poems about jazz, racial prejudice and the Vietnam War ( the entire section "Debriefing Ghosts" is a terrific sequence of anti-war poems), but I also enjoyed the ones not as easily catagorized. "Kosmos" is one of the best poems written to Walt Whitman I've ever read, and "The Glass Ark," about a couple unearthing fossils in the LaBrea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, is funny, playful and sexual without losing an odd seriousness.His language at times reminds me of Charles Simic--he seemingly finds the most disparate images that somehow seem "right"--but he is entirely on his own when it comes to combining long and short sequences, humor, sex, music and memory. Highly reccomended.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, May 3, 1999

By 

"dmax801" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arcady (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

I was stunned at the amount of intelligence and density in this poetry. I ordered this after hearing "The Deck" on NPR, as a gift for my wife, and we both consider it a treasure.