Drought-Adapted Vine

By Donald Revell

"Donald Revell writes with a drunken equipoise among the weedy flowers and bees of roadside museums and vacant churches. . . .[Here] are poems that border the hereafter and revive the child's play of prophecy. What miraculous assistance they provide!"—Dean Young

Donald Revell pushes boundaries between words and music, transcending our current notion of beauty and innocence. Personal memory, the visionary, the eccentric, and the divine intertwine between networks of stories that connect past and present through paint strokes, composition, and pastoral lyric. Pure of heart poems lie down in a vibrant field of paradox, basking gratefully in the sun of unknowing.

From "Beyond Disappointment":

Hence and farewell valediction: "life's journey."
It makes no sense. The children mock us with it.
A typewriter beneath the Christmas tree
Calls to the icecaps. Illustrated monthlies
Burn in the wasps' burnt nest. It is
Such perfections make the sun to rise.

Donald Revell has authored eleven collections of poetry, most recently Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell is the director of graduate studies and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781938584299

Donald Revell

DONALD REVELL is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently of The English Boat (2018) and Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), both from Alice James books, Revell has also published six volumes of translations.

Book preview

I

…what we changed

Was innocence for innocence…

—The Winter’s Tale

Chorister

Cello or clarinet, it was smoke, smoke,

Just as Paradise fading over time at the road’s

End is a black and white photograph

Of Paradise. Elementary schoolboy

Leaning into the hedgerow somehow still,

Such am I. A car passes. And then no

Traffic at all, for hours, for years it seems.

Make a little music, boy. Light a cigarette

Found in the roadway, a sign from God.

I remember the bitter taste of small berries

Before the summer began, and then

A bitter taste again in early autumn. Sweetness,

A little portion, like a wisp of smoke

Mistaken for music. A lonely car

Is all the traffic ever comes. Walk on.

I am entering a photograph fades with me

And no one else. Ahead, a derelict

Sound in the shape of cellos disappears

Into pale, gray foliage. Childhood’s

Amazon River hounded out of church,

Out of the painfully small portion

Of ripe berries any soul can find,

Empties into Paradise one white boy.

A Shepherd’s Calendar

A boy’s face above a bicycle

One hour after sunrise

Riding west-south-west insists

Out of marred and moving whiteness

Wisdom consists entirely

Of afterwards, of far ahead

Where time is finished with itself

Just as the mountains over there

Are finished with the sun. For now,

Joy. For an hour at least,

The effortless white of the wheels.

Boy, to mar is to marvel.

To be the wound of the sun

On Time’s face is beautiful.

Alphabet City: An Autobiography

AUGUSTINE

God is in the kitchen drawer,

And His love is infinite.

BEES

Are dying everywhere, and it

Will be the death of all gardens.

CHILDREN

Are bees.

DANTE

Has a box of crayons he’d like to share.

EVERYWHERE

There is one flower

Afraid of the sunlight.

FEAR

Desolates the colors,

Pigment of bees, pigment of children.

GUEVARA

Has a magical book. When

Someone reads it, she becomes a bird

No soldier can harm.

HEART

Is a hollow island

With hands of its own.

Those hands crush the heart.

ISOLDE

Is making her Christmas list

At the kitchen table. From time to time,

She pats the enormous dog at her feet.

JESUS

Held a buttercup beneath my