From Publishers Weekly
PW said last year that Revell was due for a career retrospective, and this ample and almost shockingly varied cull of poems from eight books rewards that call richly. New readers can watch a brilliant writer retain his talent but change his style, and his prevailing temperament, almost beyond recognition. Revell began as a disenchanted urbanite, reflecting his Bronx upbringing and his academic training in the convoluted sentences and increasing dejection of his first three volumes, culminating with 1990's appropriately titled
New Dark Ages. With
Beautiful Shirt (1994) Revell began to abandon his bleak pentameter musings for even more cryptic, but more optimistic, short lines, informed and infused by Christian mysticism: "A leaf is the shape of God/ torn apart." The poet's relocations to Utah and Nevada, and the life he made there with his wife (the poet Claudia Keelan) and their son, make his most recent verse also his happiest and his most accessible, with links to his avant-garde peers but also to the luminous directness of James Wright. Fans of Revell's
My Mojave (2003) will also enjoy the confident and generous new poems at this volume's close, in which "We are not make-believe, and God is one of us."
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Hardcover
edition.
Review
"It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell's are so fresh, it's as if he's the first person ever to do it."-Time Magazine
“Revell is a writer of singular talent and ambition . . . he takes the reader to unfamiliar and strange places and, in the process, he creates some of the most beautiful poetry in our language.”—Harvard Review
"To read this selection from Donald Revell's 20-plus years of making poems is to witness the evolution of both an individual poet and the poetics of an entire era."-Boston Review
