Donald Revell > Quotes

“the distance fills and nearness is a void”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“and that leaves me. And that leaves you.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“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.”
― Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye

“In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.”
― Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye

“the fragrance of a sound”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“Still, I love a crowd of us.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The sea has left us but the sun remains”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“God is the sound when there is none.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“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.”
― Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye

“The afterlife unravels before our eyes”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“I have seen a sparrow becoming the world's end”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“each of the best minds ends by making fairy tales”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“All night I was awake with useless sympathy what use is childhood that falls to its death”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“she shapes her surface lights into the shape of breasts.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“the world is no fit place for human beings. we harm and ache.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“I walk reciting every quiet word I know...”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“Humanness is a window thrown against a wall.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The fossil record quietly accounts for me...”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The grit of the deathbed earth grows soft”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“Pigeon, your wings are no good.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“I would know Christina Rossetti in a minute but not you.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“Love makes us infamous when love is coldly true”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The color is youth.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The man is a cabin, poorly kept.”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“I have caught sight of my true friend rounding the hillside in his cloak of rain”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“There is a heaven of disembodied voices”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“white and wise as the Sophoclean moon”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The shadows of leaves are addressed to immortality”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“One life one life and a broken tree it two trees mine a dead branch among the hundred living”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy

“The world has a body and I have none”
― Donald Revell, Tantivy