Diminutive Revolutions

by Daniel Bouchard

Poetry. Poetry, geography, ornithology, and history. Daniel Bouchard is the captain of them all. Here is a poet who has found his place in the topography of a sprawling world. His navigations are a pleasure to behold -- Lisa Jarnot. Daniel Bouchard's book is wonderful. A pure and absolute democracy of insight -- Jennifer Moxley. Daniel Bouchard is an editor, with William Corbett and Joseph Torra, of the new press Pressed Wafer (see New Publisher list on pg. 3). His WRACKLINE (Situations Press) is also available from SPD.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mid-length poem, five to fifteen pages, is one of the most difficult to bring off well: it's less forgiving of boggy stretches than a longer work, and yet cannot rely on a reader's willingness or ability to keep the entire poem in mind at one time as a shorter work does. How miraculous then that this first book should include two of the best mid-length poems of the past decade: 'Wrackline' and 'A Private History of Books,' the former a sanitation worker's view of the urban environment, the latter a book collector's version of materialist history.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To walk out from the building
the morning after
an intense rainstorm and discover
a car crushed by a last-century tree
at a Philadelphia intersection.
Your skin
is warm and lovely. This
was all farmland once."

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an age of blogs and GoodReads™, Bouchard stokes faith in a poetry of place. These poems are all deep Boston—starlings and seaward dormers, trestle beams and littered graveyards—and catalog the wrack of late capital against “the centuries' intricate layers” with the authority of long habitation.

Bouchard’s at his best in longer discursive poems like
"Wrackline," "Audubon Days," and the bravura "A Private History of Books" that let his easy line stretch out to full effect, gathering up Thoreau and potsmoke, Kropotkin and CVS, until the writing’s enclosed an exact and layered topography. But the shorter poems, in their insistent wrestle with history and the political tensions of the present, have their virtues too.