My Mojave

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