Poets
Donald Revell was born in the
Bronx, in the year of 1954. He now lives with his wife, Claudia Keelan, who is also a poet, and his son, Benjamin. They all live in
Las Vegas, Nevada. He graduated of SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Buffalo. He taught at a university before approaching his poetry career. Since year 1994, he serves as an English professor at the
University of
Utah, where he is now a Director of Creative Writing. Six years before that he has been the Editor of Denver Quarterly and a poetry editor for Colorado Review since 1996. He is the author of eight collections of poetry- My Mojave (Alice James, 2003);
Arcady (Wesleyan, 2002); There Are Three (Wesleyan, 1998); Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan, 1994); Erasures (Wesleyan, 1992); New Dark Ages (Wesleyan, 1990); The
Gaza of Winter (University of Georgia Press, 1988); and From the Abandoned Cities (Harper & Row, 1983).
Donald Revell says:
Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.
A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)
Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world,
Completing its changes
With no change.
In the morning after a storm,
We used brooms. Out front,
There was broken glass to collect.
In the backyard, the sand
Was covered with transparent wings.
The insects could not use them in the wind
And so abandoned them. Why
Hadn’t the wings scattered? Why
Did they lie so stilly where they’d dropped?
It can only be the wind passed through them.
Jealous lover,
Your desire
Passes the same way.
And jealous earth,
There is a shadow you cannot keep
To yourself alone.
At midday,
My soul wants only to go
The black road which is the white road.
I’m not needed
Like wings in a storm,
And God is the storm.
I liked this poem because it compared two very different things effectively. It uses a simile in the whole poem to compare the morning after the storm and a jealous lover. I didn’t really like the bracketed phrase in the beginning and yet still don’t know why it is there.
