Donald Revell

FREE VERSE
May 8, 2015 Revell Donald

FREE VERSE

 

Small woods upon an incline

Thewed of the levin, lean

Down there exactly trodden

Where leaves become a hillside torrent

To a broken man a small dog

In the crook of his arm. Imagine

He carries a windmill

In a walnut shell, imagine

Across the bivouacs of Labrador

One Samuel loves one hotter

A virgin to the last of men

All onto the shining grass, eagles,

Onto the fallen leaves a Prophet,

The glory and misfortune of angels here.

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: EssaysEssay: 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.