We love onto the exit,A little rain and the townNot unwilling: Kiwanis;Quick service; actual geeseGoing easy amidst children.Easy, too, both to rememberAnd to find a shoe parlor,The Merry-Go-Round,And those same childrenStanding over the X-ray,Wiggling bones inside their toes.The uncanny comes to us in oddNumbers along the toll roads.Rain is the reason, and old painsHave emptied the public library soThat only the bare shelves showOne hour, one eighteenth birthday.Benevolence was all the rageFor distant lakes, familiar ponds.Today is a labor of windowsWhited with disuse and birdlime.Get back into the car. Love meWhere never once you found me:The next exit, the not unwilling town.
Canandaigua
Donald Revell
“My love / exists to prove you impossible.”—Donald Britton
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“CANANDAIGUA” from CANANDAIGUA: by Donald Revell.
Published by Alice James Books on June 11, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Donald Revell.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of Canandaigua (2024) and White Campion (2021). Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays; Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. 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. Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives in Geneva, New York.
“In these intellectual and precise poems, Revell explores the darker side of human progress with inventive language and apt allusions to myth and religion.... It’s a pleasure to see Revell continue to evolve four decades into his illustrious career.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Donald Revell's 'Canandaigua' compounds itself of archaic beauty and immediate freshets of fair vigils of praise and invention. Its dictionary holds the sky for all it is worth and breah the agendas of waste economies. Gainsaying death, these splendiferous poems invite us to join, to mourn and rejoice."
—Angela Ball
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