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My Mojave: Poems
Donald Revell’s eighth collection, My Mojave, concerns itself with beauty, with the way in which the divine pours through the eye and into the soul. The poems seek their gods in that place where the natural and human worlds come together, where "miserable cardinals comfort/The broken seesaws/And me who wants no comfort/Only to believe." With tightly crafted, sensual lines, the poems are keenly aware of the deserts we inhabit, all the while marveling at the effortlessness of poetry and worship in a world so magnificently capable of proliferating itself and its beauty.
Short Fantasia
The plane descending from an empty sky
Onto numberless real stars
Makes a change in heaven, a new
Pattern for the ply of spirits on bodies.
We are here. Sounds press our bones down.
Someone standing recognizes someone else.
We have no insides. All the books
Are written on the steel beams of bridges.
Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoes
With a brown leaf. I stand, and I read again
The story of Aeneas escaping the fires
And his wife’s ghost. We shall meet again
At a tree outside the city. We shall make
New sounds and leave our throats in that place.
Praise for Donald Revell’s There Are Three:
"The touch throughout is extraordinarily refined, the -language trimmed and delicate beyond praise. It’s almost as terrible and pure as Bach’s music for solo violin, so to speak, deep into the strings. . . ."—Calvin Bedient, The Denver Quarterly
"There Are Three is a grave and compelling book, the kind which demands rereading."—Poetry
Short Fantasia
The plane descending from an empty sky
Onto numberless real stars
Makes a change in heaven, a new
Pattern for the ply of spirits on bodies.
We are here. Sounds press our bones down.
Someone standing recognizes someone else.
We have no insides. All the books
Are written on the steel beams of bridges.
Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoes
With a brown leaf. I stand, and I read again
The story of Aeneas escaping the fires
And his wife’s ghost. We shall meet again
At a tree outside the city. We shall make
New sounds and leave our throats in that place.
Praise for Donald Revell’s There Are Three:
"The touch throughout is extraordinarily refined, the -language trimmed and delicate beyond praise. It’s almost as terrible and pure as Bach’s music for solo violin, so to speak, deep into the strings. . . ."—Calvin Bedient, The Denver Quarterly
"There Are Three is a grave and compelling book, the kind which demands rereading."—Poetry
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
36 people want to read
About the author
Donald Revell
41 books20 followersRevell 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 27, 2008
I have read Revell before and have enjoyed the sparse beauty of his lines and his jammed up syntax. I was looking forward to reading this collection. Revell is a master of enjambment and free verse form. These give the poems their own unique shape and rhythm. My Mojave is separated into two parts, Here and There. The interplay between closeness and distance.
In the “Here” section, I was interested in the poems, “Meadowork” and The “Government of Heaven.” “Meadowork” interested me because of its form. The interchange between short and long lines, the stanza indentations give the poem a swinging or swaying feeling, that goes along with the story of PITYS being blown to and fro weeping. Each indented line starts with a “b” word. The speaker of the poem seems to be showing us how things are not as they seem at first blush, “ son, a dead flower isn't the corpse of a flower.”
The Government of Heaven is one of the strongest poems in the collection. It takes place in the Here, at specific times and specific places, “June 2000,” and “October20, 2000 Iowa City. This poem is an observation and mediation of the natural wonder of life and also its darkness, “ Something fades my son's wet fingermark / From the warm stone //And then more obscenities. The images of the poem are strong and effective, “Completing the scene / Is a tree surround / by bones of horses / Slaughtered like sacrifices.” I was really impressed by the deftness to pull of this line in #4, “ And in truth there can be no greater reward/ For doing well than to be enabled to do well.//Actual photograph of entertainer.
Throughout the collection the poems interact with one another giving it a texture that is not found in most collections. Revell is spiritual poet and there are references to God and Christ in the poems, but it is not a sectarian God that Revell writes, but a beautiful thing a, wild thing,
[…] God is a wild thing
Or still a flower
And then arrives as a beautiful boy.
I see his wagon
Now in this now in that animal.
"Invisible Green,"
Revell and his wife Claudia Keelan, have a similar sensibility to their writing. They write rich poems that engage the reader, and challenges the reader to be present with them in their explorations.
In the “Here” section, I was interested in the poems, “Meadowork” and The “Government of Heaven.” “Meadowork” interested me because of its form. The interchange between short and long lines, the stanza indentations give the poem a swinging or swaying feeling, that goes along with the story of PITYS being blown to and fro weeping. Each indented line starts with a “b” word. The speaker of the poem seems to be showing us how things are not as they seem at first blush, “ son, a dead flower isn't the corpse of a flower.”
The Government of Heaven is one of the strongest poems in the collection. It takes place in the Here, at specific times and specific places, “June 2000,” and “October20, 2000 Iowa City. This poem is an observation and mediation of the natural wonder of life and also its darkness, “ Something fades my son's wet fingermark / From the warm stone //And then more obscenities. The images of the poem are strong and effective, “Completing the scene / Is a tree surround / by bones of horses / Slaughtered like sacrifices.” I was really impressed by the deftness to pull of this line in #4, “ And in truth there can be no greater reward/ For doing well than to be enabled to do well.//Actual photograph of entertainer.
Throughout the collection the poems interact with one another giving it a texture that is not found in most collections. Revell is spiritual poet and there are references to God and Christ in the poems, but it is not a sectarian God that Revell writes, but a beautiful thing a, wild thing,
[…] God is a wild thing
Or still a flower
And then arrives as a beautiful boy.
I see his wagon
Now in this now in that animal.
"Invisible Green,"
Revell and his wife Claudia Keelan, have a similar sensibility to their writing. They write rich poems that engage the reader, and challenges the reader to be present with them in their explorations.
February 20, 2008
What I find most fascinating about this book is the elision between landscape and language. Revell has a tight and condensed style, and that style pulls together the first and second part, making a whole country full of common objects made fantastic, and divine perspectives made common.
July 16, 2011
I feel like a dick to say this to someone as respected as Revell, but it felt phoned in. One or two great poems, but most of them were the same thing over and over. God, obscure mythology reference, bird, the clouds, and a holiday. Over and over. A lot of them were just sketches, really.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews