Donald Revell
Donald Revell Poems
I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
...
Virgil watched them
Crossing the river away from him
The fathers without their children
Only a little while
...
Death calls my dog by the wrong name.
A little man when I was small, Death grew
Beside me, always taller, but always
Confused as I have almost never been.
...
Linoleum and half a dozen eggs
In 1960
Many towered Ilium
A brand name and a shopping list too
...
Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry "We are ripe, reap us!"
—Ted Hughes
I begin to think Actaeon never changed.
...
1
Fitfully in pictures disappearing now,
They are not toys but, rather, tiny horses
In the parade of youth: polish, spit, and display
...
The climate thinks with its knees.
When the wound opens, music suspires.
Opening a gate, I gain the color
below the roof tiles and the tree limbs.
...
Before anything could happen,
flecks of real gold
on her mouth, her eyes more
convex than any others,
...
They all wore little hats
Vermont that I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
...
It doesn't matter
A damn what's playing—
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 -
...
The bar in the commuter station steams
like a ruin, its fourth wall open
to the crowd and the fluttering timetables.
...
All their songs are of one hour
Before dawn, when the birds begin.
I sing another.
In helpless midday, at the hour
...
(variations on the testimony and excommunication of
Anne Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1637-1638)
I.
Given to sweet motion
...
What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes for
Bitterest underflesh of the farewell.
I was a man and suffered like a girl.
I spoke underneath to where the lights are
...
Some motionless conflict in the sky
As of Milton's angels painted there
In all their radiance and red malice
...
The last snow is baited.
Where the future shatters
it unbends.
The dry bed of entirety,
...
I am so lonely for the twentieth century,
for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti
of armed men and the beautiful bridges
that make them so small and carry them
...
Unreal precision of the houses at first light
45 years of rain and bodice
Grasses woods wildflowers
To be the only woman at this hour
...
Donald Revell Biography
Born in the Bronx, Donald Revell received his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, translations, and essays. His recent books include Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), Tantivy (2012), and the prose work, Essay: A Critical Memoir (2015). Steeped in the work of Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams, Revell’s poetry is “seriously Christian but not doctrinaire, mystical without setting intellect aside, angry over political matters without ever growing stale or shrill, and more often joyful than any other living poet of his powers,” observes critic Stephen Burt, noting that in A Thief of Strings (2007) Revell “may have constructed the only language of ecstasy that makes sense for our secular, self-doubting age.” Since his first collection, From Abandoned Cities (1983), a National Poetry Series winner, Revell’s poetry has moved toward a yearning for transparency and innocence. Although Revell was originally a formalist poet, his more recent work tends to be in free verse and aims, in his words, “to make something out of words through which meaning can pass without impediment and without significant loss of energy.” As he teaches his students, “Craft is nothing. Sincerity is everything.” His awards include two Pushcart Prizes, two Shestack Prizes, the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, two PEN Center USA Awards in poetry, and fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. After editing the Denver Quarterly from 1988 to 1994, Revell joined the Colorado Review as poetry editor in 1995. He has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Denver, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Utah, and Nevada-Las Vegas. Revell lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan.)
The Best Poem Of Donald Revell
My Trip
I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
Across a river somewhere in Normandy
Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades.
Of course, the river's in California,
And the actor is dead now. Nevertheless,
This is the first of many hotels this trip,
And I find myself preferring wars
To smut on the networks,
Even as I find myself reading
The Pisan Cantos for the umpteenth time
Instead of the novel in my bag.
The poet helps me to the question:
Does anything remain of home at home?
Next day is no way of knowing,
And the day after is my favorite,
A small museum really perfect
And a good meal in the middle of it.
As I'm leaving,
I notice a donkey on a vase
Biting the arm of a young girl,
And outside on the steps
A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap.
Plenty remains.
The work of poetry is trust,
And under the aegis of trust
Nothing could be more effortless.
Hotels show movies.
Walking around even tired
I find my eyes find
Numberless good things
And my ears hear plenty of words
Offered for nothing over the traffic noise
As sharp as sparrows.
A day and a day, more rivers crossing me.
It really feels that way, I mean
I have changed places with geography,
And rivers and towns pass over me,
Showing their scars, finding their friends.
I like it best when poetry
Gleams or shows its teeth to a girl
Forever at just the right moment.
I think I could turn and live underneath the animals.
I could be a bottlecap.
Going to the airport going home,
I stop with my teacher, now my friend.
He buys me a good breakfast, berries and hotcakes.
We finish and, standing, I hear
One policeman saying to another
Over the newspaper in a yellow booth
'Do you know this word regret, Eddie?
What does it mean?'
Plenty of words over the traffic noise,
And nothing could be more effortless.
Catching a glimpse of eternity, even a poor one, says it all.
Donald Revell Comments
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