Poems from the indestructible wilderness of American words and silences.

Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul." These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.

"Songs for the living, songs for the dead, shadowed by those voices echoing through the streets of that (absent) City on a Hill. The impossible, unanswerable question of grace, redemption, reprieve drives Revell's poems toward a pitch, and a grace, not often attained in our time. The urgency of their appeal lingers in the mind long after the page has been turned."—Michael Palmer

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DONALD REVELL was a National Poetry Series Winner in 1982 for his first book of poems, From Abandoned Cities (1983). In 1985 he won a Pushcart Prize. His collection New Dark Ages (Wesleyan 1990) won the PEN Center USA West Award for Poetry. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. His other books include Erasures (Wesleyan, 1992), and Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan, 1994); he also translated a volume of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, entitled Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995).

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