Donald Revell
Revell has won numerous honors and awards for his work, beginning with his first book, From the Abandoned Cities, which was a National Poetry Series winner. More recently, he won the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and is a two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry. He has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. His most recent book is The Bitter Withy (Alice James Books, 2009).
Revell has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Colorado, and Utah. He currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives in Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children. In addition to his writing, translating, and teaching, Revell was Editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988–94, and has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996.
Revell received his B.A. from Harpur College in 1975, his M.A. from SUNY Binghamton in 1977 and his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo in 1980.
“Creation's the soul of haphazard.”
“I would know Christina Rossetti in a minute but not you.”
“Beauty for Beauty's sake and only later for the sake of others, newborn for a day.”
“One life one life and a broken tree it two trees mine a dead branch among the hundred living”
“the world is no fit place for human beings. we harm and ache.”
“Still, I love a crowd of us.”
“Pigeon, your wings are no good.”
“the rest are secrets save for oriole which is a color in the afterlife”
“what use is a childhood?”
“The afterlife unravels before our eyes”
“the fragrance of a sound”
“Humanness is a window thrown against a wall.”
“The man is a cabin, poorly kept.”
“each of the best minds ends by making fairy tales”
“Creation is the miniature of creation”
“The grit of the deathbed earth grows soft”
“I have caught sight of my true friend rounding the hillside in his cloak of rain”
“I have seen a sparrow becoming the world's end”
“The shadows of leaves are addressed to immortality”
“And so it was that I became an anthology piece translated along with many others out of the French into your small arms though I am a phantom”
“she shapes her surface lights into the shape of breasts.”
“Love makes us infamous when love is coldly true”
“All night I was awake with useless sympathy what use is childhood that falls to its death”
“the murmuring priests”
“God is the sound when there is none.”
“There is a heaven of disembodied voices”
“The color is youth.”
“The world has a body and I have none”
“Some motionless conflict in the sky”
“and that leaves me. And that leaves you.”
“white and wise as the Sophoclean moon”
“The sea has left us but the sun remains”
“the distance fills and nearness is a void”
“The fossil record quietly accounts for me...”
“I walk reciting every quiet word I know...”
“In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.”
“As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment.”
“The poetry of attention is not metaphysical. It trusts the opened eye to see. By faith, the eye stays open. And so the work of poetry is trust that, by faith, is shown to be no work at all.”