Donald Revell

LEONTES
November 28, 2016 Revell Donald

LEONTES

 

Elusive, but only sweetened by

Disuse, souls I’d entered once before

Once again trouble the surfaces of life

With their small noises and single color…

Picture the dream before the last dream

Of a troubled night—something like that.

 

There were no survivors. Afterwards,

I meet them in weak sunlight in a corner

Of urban parkland. Not far away,

There seem to be children emerging

From the waters of an ornamental lake.

Swan-boats lead them off to the horizon.

 

We are so happy. The sunlight grows weaker.

Reunion shakes the world. Let us speak of it.

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.