Quotes from Donald Revell

what use is a childhood?

the rest are secrets save for oriole which is a color in the afterlife

Pigeon, your wings are no good.

the world is no fit place for human beings. we harm and ache.

One life one life and a broken tree it two trees mine a dead branch among the hundred living

Beauty for Beauty's sake and only later for the sake of others, newborn for a day.

I would know Christina Rossetti in a minute but not you.

Creation's the soul of haphazard.

the distance fills and nearness is a void

As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment.

and that leaves me. And that leaves you.

The poetry of attention is not metaphysical. It trusts the opened eye to see. By faith, the eye stays open. And so the work of poetry is trust that, by faith, is shown to be no work at all.

In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.

The sea has left us but the sun remains

God is the sound when there is none.

the fragrance of a sound

Still, I love a crowd of us.

I walk reciting every quiet word I know...

The fossil record quietly accounts for me...

white and wise as the Sophoclean moon

Some motionless conflict in the sky

The world has a body and I have none

The color is youth.

There is a heaven of disembodied voices