Donald Revell
Список книг автора Donald RevellNew Dark Ages
<P><B>Winner of the Pen Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry (1990)</B></P><P>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?»</P>
Erasures
<P>"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.</P>
There Are Three
<P>Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. «Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul.» These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.</P>
Beautiful Shirt
<P>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.»</P><P>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.</P>