The Revell Variations

How much, in just twenty years, Donald Revell has changed! From the Abandoned Cities (1983), his debut volume, included a villanelle, a sestina, rhymed sonnets and meditative terza rima. The book evoked bleak cityscapes from the Bronx to Belfast, where "sadness clings to the round/like fog." Revell's grim descriptions both depicted and feared "the collapse of life/into signs and tokens." By New Dark Ages (1990) that collapse had taken place, and Revell's landscapes had become wistful allegories or bitter, almost solipsistic dreamscapes. "All are private and seek even more privacy," Revell decided, writing elsewhere:

The stores will never open again. For the rest of our lives
we shall make constellations and gods
out of the guts of buildings and the stale damp.

Erasures (1992) and Beautiful Shirt (1994) moved even further from specifics, describing erotic, political and intellectual frustration, and mingling plangency, difficulty and self-pity:

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