White Campion by Donald Revell

A satisfying and gripping poetry collection by Donald Revell reveals poems of an extraordinary personal passion, perturbation, and frantic exultation pervading a thrilling-dramatic symbolism that is quite unique. Poems such as CATAFALQUE, SENESCO SED AMO, INGENIUM NOBIS IPSA PUELLA FACIT, OMNIA QUAE SUNT, LUMINA SUNT, SAVED FOR LATER and WHITE CAMPION with the advent of angels welcomes the spirit of ardent religious fervor by the imaginative delight concealed in the subdued expression of poet’s revelations. 

DEUS NEC LAEDIT means “God does not harm lovers.” a quote said by Albius Tibullus, a Latin poet and writer of elegies. The title of one of the poems carries the same quote and the poet’s breath asks a bizarre question to himself at the beginning of the poem about the false charm in the love. The speaker states that lovers give charming elaborated words to each other knowing the consequence of the pleasure of delaying but still we delay to get the pleasure of delaying. 

DEUS NEC LAEDIT AMANTES

My own breath questioned me:

“Is love’s bed always snow?”

In my reply, I breathed

Up into my eyes a cold pillow.

Nearer the end of everything,

I am thinking of poor Shelley’s terrible

Episode of eyes, of a great

Injured bird staring at a miracle.

In Hate Speech, the speaker raises a hypothetical style of writing by expecting to live on the moon with certain irregularities. Suddenly poet comes out from that style and emphasizes a violent event where a countless number of bullets were fired. The poet has mentioned a philosophical phrase but an infallible truth that “Time might be/Anything, but strangely is a ghost of colors”.

Hate Speech

We could live on the moon

By calendars of one color:

Days invisible but numberless,

Given to mass and to a perjured year.

Today is a day of jubilee.

Naming the titles of the poems in Latin is remarkable and entices the reader to figure out its meaning thereby increases inquisitiveness. At once chilling, revealing, and poetically powerful, White Campion embodies a meriting, edifying poetic collection by Donald Revell. I can surely give a green signal to the readers that this collection is worth purchasing. All the best Donald!

Do check out this marvellous book here: https://www.alicejamesbooks.org/bookstore/white-campion

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AUHOR BIO

Donald Revell is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently of The English Boat (2018) and Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at UNLV and faculty affiliate of the Black Mountain Institute.