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PENNYWEIGHT
WINDOWS: New and Selected Poems
by Donald Revell,
220pp, $18.95, Alice James
Books, Framlington, Maine, USA
INVISIBLE GREEN: Selected Prose
by Donald Revell,
192pp, $14.95, Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, California, USA
'Our art is simply one form of attention' Revell says in 'Dear Reader', the
coda with which Invisible Green concludes.
'Leave the window open. Answer the door.' He's talking about being open and
aware. Nothing, I would have thought, particularly startling about this -
though he goes on to re-state the idea in such a way as to draw Marjorie
Perloff's praise in the cover blurb: 'A poet ... is not a creative writer ... the world creates
itself, and poetry is pleased to show its new creation to our words.' (The
example close to his heart, literally so, in his pocket, is a late poem by
William Carlos Williams, 'Iris'.)
But the poetry of Pennyweight Windows isn't the poetry this sort of comment leads me to expect,
a 'going out to meet the world that comes so freely, so effortlessly to us
and to our senses.' The poetry flows much less with mindful attention to the
things out there than it swirls with introspection and speculation. 'Our art
is simply one form of rumination' he could have said of many of his own
works. But in one poem near the end of the book he places the act of
attending in a context which
more nearly states his purposes:
To observe
and reflect
Simultaneously, that
Would be
godly.
[from
'Landscape with Free Will and Predestination']
I'm a new reader of Revell's poems, and it's taken me a long time to read Pennyweight
Windows. It's a heavy
book, including as it does selections from eight books of poems as well new
poems. Much of it is heavy in other senses of the word: the spiritual and
philosophical speculation can be heavy going at times. Not that I mind that.
But I often find after an hour or so with the book that what I'm reading
leaves me emotionally depressed; I return to it (parts of it at least) with a
heavy heart.
From Revell's second book The Gaza of Winter come two poems about childhood. In
'Birthplace', he revisits as a seeker, but finds only 'A place to be used,
impossible really to love / Except as a place survived.' The poem shows that
the people who lived there were simply buried by the place; they didn't
imagine being able to alter it in any way - its last line is 'they are proved
right, and I do not exist.' The poem which follows this, 'The Children's
Undercroft' moves on to Sunday School and this evaluation of the experience
...anything
as stained
and usual as our own lives,
was an
impoverishment we could not imagine
and had to
live with anyway. It would drag
through
unremarkable events towards nothing
happy.
Just look at the negative load carried by the vocabulary alone: stained / usual / impoverishment / drag
/ unremarkable / nothing - a vocabulary which prepares us for the real downer
of the ending
Every Sunday,
the spinet would sound more
cast-off. Our
easy hymns would become dull
or silly.
Over-rehearsed, we would at last
enter the
real kingdom unmoved and not sing.
'The New World', a poem from Revell's third book, moves into 'bad museums
where I spend time' and here again the mood of the poem is determined by its
vocabulary - emptiness / nothing / remote / exhausted.
Some of these words are used more than once: Revell has an interesting way of
repeating phrases or constructions to shape his poems. This poem opens with
the line 'A little emptiness beforehand'. The third stanza opens with this
echo: 'In the next room, a handful of religious paintings. / A little
emptiness in the faces'. 'The remote handiwork of the ironmonger' in the
first stanza has its echo in the
poem's final line: 'Outside, the remote handiwork of traffic makes no sound.'
A few pages later 'Against Pluralism' offers this view of existence:
It is a wise
child who knows he is no angel.
The rest of
us grow up hovering, visiting
our lives in
the moment of pain or orgasm
or when the
little fingers of pity push
inside us and
we feel loved. Our suffering
gales beneath
our wings like applause.
I'm not intending to imply that the writing is other than densely packed with
interest, as it is here with the idea of 'angel' taken up again in 'hovering'
and 'wings', but it can be deeply sombre even negative at times. A selected
poems points up this sort of load.
Now one reason for this may be that over the years Revell seems to have
written quite a few poems while staying in hotels or in the 'bar in the
commuter station.' 'They have given me a room near the power station' is how
he opens 'The Night Orchard' and you're not at all surprised that the
sleeplessness of being in that room leads to this sort of thing:
The questions
that we ask of the civil world
leave us one
choice: either freedom
is identical
with happiness or we are all
on islands in
the middle of flat continents
jolted by the
stammer of sleepless dreaming.
But by the time we come to 'The is the first of many hotels this trip' in the
eighth book, My Mojave,
the mood is altogether lighter. 'My Trip' is no less speculative and
philosophical, but it unites that attention to detail which Invisible
Green led me to expect
with wit and with a quite different attitude to the traffic. Leaving the
hotel, '...outside on the steps / a silver fish head glistens beside a
bottlecap. / Plenty remains.' Remains? - this is a writer enjoying himself:
The work of poetry is trust,
And under the
aegis of trust
Nothing could
be more effortless.
...
I find my
eyes find
Numberless
good things
and my ears
hear plenty of good words
Offered for
nothing over the traffic noise
As sharp as
sparrows.
'Numberless good things' - what a relief. And the poem ends in what I've come
to see as part of his style, with echoing phrases, but now positively:
Plenty of
words over traffic noise,
And nothing
could be more effortless.
Catching a
glimpse of eternity, even a poor one, says it all.
'The Gaza of Winter' (the title poem of his second collection) may look at
first glance like a sestina with repeating end-words. But these are seven
line stanzas. And the lines echo themselves, divide, marry half of another
line and re-group. Wow, I want to say, some wizardry here. Actually, a bit
too much - I'm completely distracted from what the poem might be saying by
this counting and checking. The play with form and repeat is, like the mood,
lighter in later work. Remember 'My Trip' 's bottlecap next to the fish head
on the hotel steps'? 'I could be a bottlecap', he adds in a contented moment
later in the poem.
Not only is the mood lighter, and the repeats, but also the syntax: the voice
has become more innocent, almost wide-eyed. 'I like it best when poetry /
Gleams, or shows its teeth to
girl / Forever at just the right moment' he writes just before that
bottlecap gleams, in an easy shift between the particular and the general.
Rather than operate the 'show not tell' routine, Revell frequently does tell,
even starts out with a generalisation and only later adduces a piece of
evidence, a particular, to support it - often a quite unexpected one. An
early poem 'Here to There' works in this way, opening with a relaxed
generalisation:
The biggest
part of any story is rooms
and the
things inside them. Everything else is too
vague, too
uncertain in the way it happens,
changes or
recites the lines it was
created to
recite to live on its own.
and then straight into his particular:
'I have a picture of an old friend naked.' The picture brings back the
room in which it was taken, and then in that context, the friend. That same
movement happens in a short, later poem, 'Picnic', which appears
straightforward until you look at the contradiction held in the opening line:
The story of
my life is untrue but not
Thanksgiving
Day when the bee fell into the bottle.
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There's a
great deal of delight being taken in the way words work and are bound into
syntax. This is more sophisticated than 'simply one form of attention', but
then Invisible Green
does of course say go on to say much more than this. Revell has said
elsewhere 'Theology is important to my writing as I rely on my poems to chart
and charter my relationship to the divine and to eternity. Thus, everything I
read by choice becomes
theology...' [herecomeseverybody.blogspot]
The larger part of the prose book is a series of nine essays originally
published in American Poetry Review quite recently: this is the lighter (later) Revell
speaking. He gives answers to the 'what is poetry' question that extend his
'one form of attention' answer with extensive references to favoured poets in
his quest for the soul of poetry. (The phrase 'invisible green' is Thoreau's:
'I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my
eye side by side with its - and learn of it'. [Quoted IG, p93])
Here is a poet prepared to say that poetry is a delight: 'Poetry, the soul of
poems, does not reside or rest in them. It goes. We follow. We read to go
where poetry has gone and to preserve the possibility of a delightful
contract.' [IG,
p.28] His examples - Emerson, Creeley, Pound. Pound features frequently in many
of these nine essays, and in new ways: he devotes a whole essay to spiders,
at least the way Pound wrote about them in his cell. Long sections of cited
works are offered as illustrations of his insights. Ecstasy is the subject of
the second essay. Bliss - or expansiveness - the subject of the third.
Ashbery is the poet most quoted here. Essay VI refers to The Horizon,
defining a poem as 'something to do in the meantime' - I love that. In the
meantime, as a preparation, he says. Offering examples of poems that write
towards eternity, again he gives us Pound. And Traherne. And Thoreau.
I'm interested that these essays, written in 2002 and 2003 are also able to
open out their concerns and acknowledge the politics of their time as well.
Essay IX takes as it subject The Pastoral, and offers its contemplation, its
stillness as a route to peace in the face of the (then) possible Iraq war.
Some of the same writers appear in the second part of the book, in which he
considers Reverdy, Thoreau, Merwin, Camus, and Ashbery. I'm going to re-read
what he calls eight meditations on the enabling qualities he finds in Ashbery's
writing. 'Three Poems',
he says, 'is nothing but
influence; the poem happens in the moment when the reader turns away from the
poem.' [IG p167] Revisiting
the selected poems, I'll start at the end. (Depressives among you may prefer
things the right way round.)
© Jane
Routh 2006
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