My Mojave: Poems

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 FantasiaThe plane descending from an empty skyOnto numberless real starsMakes a change in heaven, a newPattern 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 booksAre written on the steel beams of bridges.Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoesWith a brown leaf. I stand, and I read againThe story of Aeneas escaping the firesAnd his wife's ghost. We shall meet againAt a tree outside the city. We shall makeNew 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