I had known of Komunyakaa for a while, but only recently began reading him. I'm glad I did. This is a book full of very different types of poems--some with regular stanza lengths, some with numbered sections, some short and without stanzas--and it is consistently excellent throughout. I think many poets tend to repeat themselves, but Komunyakaa seems to be one of the most courageous and technically sound poets there is. He is known for his poems about jazz, racial prejudice and the Vietnam War ( the entire section "Debriefing Ghosts" is a terrific sequence of anti-war poems), but I also enjoyed the ones not as easily catagorized. "Kosmos" is one of the best poems written to Walt Whitman I've ever read, and "The Glass Ark," about a couple unearthing fossils in the LaBrea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, is funny, playful and sexual without losing an odd seriousness.His language at times reminds me of Charles Simic--he seemingly finds the most disparate images that somehow seem "right"--but he is entirely on his own when it comes to combining long and short sequences, humor, sex, music and memory. Highly reccomended.

I was stunned at the amount of intelligence and density in this poetry. I ordered this after hearing "The Deck" on NPR, as a gift for my wife, and we both consider it a treasure.

Arcady is a unique anthology of brief, free-verse poetry by Donald Revell that borrows inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create an American feel to its style, which mourns death yet embraces the natural splendor of the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada. A moving, thoughtful selection that leads the reader to ponder and open oneself to what lies beyond death and grief. Nature A Corner For Me: Nature a corner for me/There will be no room/For my portrait//Besides I have seen/Enough people and horses/And extraordinary fish//.To dream like this/Was worth the trouble/Getting here//My other ideas/Seem premature/Like ghosts now//The most beautiful star/Is crossing me

Donald Revell's poetry combines spare silences and a weird jazzy imagery that is hauntingly original. One can feel the musical imagery of Klee here, as if the words and their sensations had been transformed into a shifting, living song full of the slight horrors and joys of everyday living. Formally, Revell is among the most progressive poets alive. And stylistically, he is all his own. If someone asked me where poetry is today, I would answer, right here.

This book presents a collection of work wherein Revell masters his unique phrasings and socio-polical concerns, planting them together in poems that ultimately succeed in a very important way: they report and then transcend the obscure complexities of modern life, while simultaneously calling upon memory, identity, and deep experience for salvation.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Revell's work is that, for the most part, he adheres to a precision in his syntax, even though the images and observations he presents are, at times, extremely sublime, even surreal. It lures the reader into dark territories of experience, which ultimately transform into what might be called a 'new' or 'created' wisdom.

The best poems in the collection, 'Perspective', 'A Parish in the Bronx', 'The Northeast Corridor', 'St. Lucy's Day', and 'The Judas Nocturne,' are absoulute jewels. Of the aforementioned poems, The Judas Nocturne provides the following:

"How lovely
if the fate of nations flowered and collapsed
in little rooms at street level, rooms like mine
where I am just explaining to someone
that she is a cloud chamber of furtive stars
and that I have a map of them."

These lines display Revell's masterful ability to attack experience from an impressive array of perpectives. The phenomenal, the temporal, the personal, the political, the social, and the transcendant are all compiled into lines that propel precisely toward the part of the reader that simply cannot defend itself from such a onslaught from all sides.

Perhaps the strongest poem of all is 'The Northeast Corridor," presented here in its entirety:

The Northeast Corridor

The bar in the communter station steams
like a ruin, its fourth wall open
to the crowd and the fluttering timetables.
In the farthest corner, the television
crackles a torch song and a beaded gown.
She is my favorite singer, dead when I ws born.
And I have been waiting for hours for a train,
exhausted between connections to small cities,
awake only in my eyes finding shelter
in the fluttering ribbon of shadow
around the dead woman singing on the scree.
Exhaustion is the last line of defense
where time either stops dead or kills you.
It teaches you to see what your eyes see
without questions, without the politics
of living in one city, dying in another.

How hadly I would like to sleep now
in the shadows beside real things or beside
things that were real once, like the beaded gown
on the television, like the debut
of a song in New York in black and white
when my parents were there. I feel sometimes
my life was used by before I was born.
My eyes sear backwards into my head
to the makeshift of what I have already seen
or heard described or dreamed about, too weary
not to envy the world its useless outlines.
Books of photographs of New York in the forties.
The dark rhombus of a window of a train
rushing past my train. The dark halo
around the body of a woman I love

from something much farther than a distance.

The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off,
it takes your arms and paradesin front of you
such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses
trellised along the sides with green so deep
it is like black hair, only transparent,
of woman singing, of trains of lithium
on the awkening body of a landscape
or across the backdrop of an old city
steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties.
The world exhausts everything except my eyes
because it is a long walk to the world
begun before I was born. In the far corner
the dead woman bows off the satge. The television
crunples into a white dot as the last
train of the evening, my train, is announced.
I lived in one place. I want to die in another. "

These poems are dramatic, serious, lyrical, and contemplative. They are also intellectual. But they have the voice of a brave intellect that seeks irreducible truths in a modern world borne from a nearly unbearable pluralism of ontologies.

The usual poetic methods cannot adequately make sense of such a world. Often, many poets merely report and respond. Revell goes to the next level, which is the truly 'poetic' level, and contructs new methods by which we might see ourselves honestly and forgivingly, and somehow finds a way to survive our personal and collective shortcomings.

In short, you believe these poems; they hold big truths about our collective entrapment, and our potential salvation.

Donald Revell captures life's struggles and hopes. The front cover is a good indication of where the book is going to take you. It is a painting by Rosenburg, in which he took a previous painting and altered it to fit into a new dimension. This is similar to Revell's ability to cause the reader of his beautifully short book to change their view on poetry. I have the privilege of knowing Donald personally, and I can only say that this book is an awakening into a beautiful man.