Through close attention to nature's myriad syntheses and separations, Donald Revell's sage lyric meditations seek and find proof of the otherworldly. These poems are ripe with the ecstatic vision we come to expect from Revell's work.

"Victorians"

"There is snow and there is snow.
A young woman, daughter of the eminent physician,
Disrobes at her window, and starvation,
Like a pack of dogs with jeweled mouths,
Pauses a moment, howls, and the young woman
Recites a poem to herself."

"So long ago the words are lost
Even as each remains a part of us.
Christmas meaning snow out of a broiling sun.
Humanity meaning numbers.
Childhood meaning children and railings and kisses
Never kissed but carved into real trees."

"Motherless goddamn modernity never grew.
Here we are again at Christmas
On fire escapes without a fire in view."

Poet, translator, and critic Donald Revell has authored ten previous collections of poetry. Winner of the 2008 NEA Translation Award, the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Revell has received fellowships from the NEA, Ingram Merrill, and Guggenheim memorial foundations. He is poetry editor of "Colorado Review."

In Donald Revell's poems, the present is often little more than an instant caught between the sadness of memory and the need to face the future's blank expanse. Even the best dreams recall happiness that cannot be retrieved, while the worst memories bend past love into a crazy line through darkness: "Anything can turn furious. The crazy / line through wreckage that wears my face and all / the faces seems not to end. And on the way, / even the most damaged things have one / surface glazed, a sudden distorting mirror / that I can't help finding. There, I look as I did / stalled in hours or places it is shame / to remember. The Eumenides are slow / vengeance, meted out by anywhere love fails / in the collapse and angry dealing of self-love. / The light presses. The air presses hard and no / story of mine if good enough to hold out."

When there is escape, calm in these poems it is often in thoughts of distant lands and pasts, in the works of other writers and artists--the bands of light and changing shadows of Cezanne's canvases, the suburban desire and deep green lawns of Cheever's fiction. It is art, stories, the urge to tell that brings hope in these lines.

Laodicea speaks English sympathetically at the edge of sense, where this world reveals another latent; and this world remains ordinary, just like we like it. In a time when we are told, amazingly, the universe is math, what does this mean for our friendships, for our language? Laodicea reminds, laughingly, that "The mind and the world / together are a Co-Cathedral" - the impulse for love and play.

Essay: A Critical Memoir is an experiment of the old school and of revived delight in the pleasures of close reading. What if all the poems are true? What if the allegories of a man or woman's life are in every way, and always, the actual shape of that life? To read is to find oneself again and again at the center of a pageant. To write is to call the pageant home. Essay is a memoir of Dante and Beatrice in New York circa 1968 and of an anti-war movement in something very much like Paradise.

Invisible Green: Selected Prose begins with the series of nine essays published in American Poetry Review, essays which enact intimate and yet capacious converse with, and among, an array of writers. Quoted works become provocations for this poet's examination of language and humanness, an examination that disrupts our more comfortable notions while extending insights as to the nature and necessity of poetry. The elegant immediacy of Revell's prose belies the complex virtuosity he demonstrates in his manipulation of the essay's formal constraints as he incorporates the works of writers with whom we may well be familiar, but whose texts will become newly illuminated by the exchange. Besides this series, the collection includes eight more essays-their subjects range from lively considerations of the writings of Henry Thoreau, Pierre Reverdy, Ronald Johnson, John Ashbery and others, to more personal essays in which Revell examines the interrelationships between language and life, memory and culture, and how these impact upon the writing and reception of poetry. Donald Revell tells us "Poetry, the soul of poems, does not reside or rest in them. It goes. We follow." Revell's language-by turns lyrically meditative, demandingly direct, defiantly iconoclastic-draws his reader into a dynamic exchange about what it means to be a reader and writer in today's world.

Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he--as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier--did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface.

Donald Revell's new work, Arcady, draws its inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create a distinctly American poetic music. Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet's intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet's awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons' passage and seasonal rituals. Revell's sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives's notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell's words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.

The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: "This is the world as I have known it./ It has a soft outline and is easily victimized."
Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.

"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.

New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality - adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as: If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful - a true vindication of humanism?"