The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: "This is the world as I have known it./ It has a soft outline and is easily victimized."
Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.
- ISBN10 0819522163
- ISBN13 9780819522160
- Publish Date 1 November 1994
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher University Press of New England
- Imprint Wesleyan University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 80
- Language English