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