In “Revelation,” Donald Revell writes, “Look for signature lightning in the night sky. / It frightens animals, and it frees you.” The passage brings together several mutually informing themes in his most recent collection, Canandaigua: the intuitive wisdom of nature, meditative engagement with the Bible, the strength and challenge of the community of forebears in writing, and compassionate response to others and oneself in the present moment. The compelling combination of familiarity and deep mystery in the collection stems from the varied ways Revell discovers to bring these essential concerns into continually awakening conversations with one another.
“Stand” presents Revell’s integral and moving interactions in reading and writing:
The solid ground is prose, and the prose
Of death is stubborn and rock-hard
With this question: Can I stand
The universe? In the great earthquake,
William James ran outdoors, shouting
“Go it! Go it!” So I can stand it
Revell communes with James’ affirmative response to the disruption caused by Earth’s living movements beneath what we commonly think of as our ground, indicating not only the awareness of being as transformation — but also the acceptance of death it implies in the context of the preceding question. This interaction opens to fears shared with others in the perceived world:
These efforts are beyond America,
But essential. The tightening
Of our heartstrings as we say “Yes”
(Meaning “I’m afraid) fixes
The republic to a shadow and to a fictional
Sunrise.
As in James’ welcoming of the unsettling earthquake, Revell gives voice to the subtextual confessions beneath our affirmations, as well as the “fictional” aspect of the hope we bootstrap ourselves toward. Recalling the opening’s complex understanding of self-transcending movement as ground, the loss of a friend whose “shadow / Only lengthens in death” combines this understanding with the feeling of loss and cherishing of an individual life, complicating our mass myth with the awareness of each soul’s irreplicable uniqueness — and our paradoxical capacity to outlive ourselves in others. On this subtle “ground,” the poem stands to embrace the present:
What an expression: The old days!
I’ve never seen one. Poetry
Is the groundless belief in fearful
Attention. Heartstrings bind
Horizons onto the real sun.
We might live forever. Go it. [italics original]
In our “fearful / Attention” to the meeting of each day, the mythic sunrise meets its warm counterpart, an indirect, mutually-affirming analogue to the relationship between living poet and textually-present predecessor, in which understanding and care for the life in the work form a collaboration in which essential being lives.
“A Mustard Tree” presents a corresponding view of reading by showing how a parable moves into life — and a new poem — in the process. The poem takes off from the parable’s comparison of the kingdom of heaven with a mustard seed, which grows from the smallest seed to the largest plant, capable of housing birds:
A Mustard Tree
Is an extravagance, a parable
Of nonexistence without nests,
And no more trouble than confetti.
A bird’s weight might bend it to earth.
How then should it rise again? Again,
Perhaps wings and a skeletal weight
Edged with death and sunlight
Have heaven to answer and heave
Upwards. Can you believe it?
The conflation of title and opening line, formally embodying the poem’s growth from its own textual seed, corresponds with the transformative “extravagance” of a parable, which becomes its meaning not only in the reader’s comprehension, but in their renewing of the world by living it. The double negation in the second line forces us to think about this miracle: We do not truly exist without a home for the soul within, and yet, amazingly, we awaken to our lives. Our process of considering the relationship between the word choices and the unquantifiable mystery they approach recreates the celebratory rediscovery within the reader, punctuated by the “confetti” analogy. Yet, this thinking requires the embrace of paradox that follows in the next stanza, the imaginal plant and bird moving flexibly together within the apparent contraries of “death and sunlight.” The interrogative appeal to the reader, also both present but unseen, adds another dimension to the poem’s synergistic life.
Dialoguing with the soul of the parable, Revell’s own imaginal birds then take flight from the poem’s Mustard Tree:
I imagine wings
All by themselves, without bodies,
Filling the whole sky. Homeless
Save for direction, and that always
Upwards, they are daylight’s darlings,
A species of prism that neither fails
Nor falls.
The birds transfigure into a soul-like bodiless flight, reforming the sky with their prismatic integration and multiplying of light, a new vision alighting from branches of the parable grown in the poet’s own meditative reading, which is likewise uncontained within a single parable:
Gratuitous beauty proves the leaven
Of cosmos and of the last moment
Before waking, our foothold in Heaven.
A lissome grass grows into empty space.
It grows wings, and the earth pays it small attentions:
Shadows here and there; weddings in Cana.
Crucially, this ending urges a return to the world after fostering its own kind of “foothold in heaven” within the “empty space” provided by our meditations. Although shadows will be perceived in and by outside perceptions, new forms of shared life may also be celebrated more deeply for their own “Gratuitous beauty.”
Indeed, Revell does not neglect these “Shadows here and there,” nor the shadow aspect of “extravagance” within human consciousness. “Light, Zeal” holds these dual understandings concurrently in mind: the “extravagance” of life itself when perceived for all its miraculous interrelated being, while, concurrently, on Earth, “The imagination does harm, real harm” :
Impossible
To find any harm in extravagance taking
Refuge, undertaking the old purposes of
Creation. But harm there was. There was
Interruption, zeal without knowledge, awe
Where tenderness ought to have looked away.
The first evocation of “extravagance” recalls its use in “The Mustard Tree;” however, the foreboding response indicates the need for the sort of balance we saw in the dance of the tree and bird above. Again, Revell turns to the fellowship of a prior writer:
Pascal writes: “Where is God? Where you are not,
And the kingdom of God is within you.”
In extravagance, all measure is desire,
Scorched earth, and menacing vapor—
Tatterdemalion adorning itself.
Inherit the earth. Invent the earth.
In pride and display harm is done. Adam
Hears the bitter echo of his beginning.
Like James, Pascal supports Revell’s apprehension of paradox despite awareness of others’ abandonment of subtle consideration. “Zeal” conjures an illusory power detached from the equanimity and presence of “the kingdom within.” Revell perceives the connection in nature between extravagance and the “desire” of creatures to be themselves. Conversely, when disconnected from deeper awareness in human consciousness, extravagance presents as an unchecked demiurgic imagination that sees its acts and creations — not being itself — as reality, a mental illusion that carries consequences of actual worldly suffering.
“Distant Sirens” offers a dramatic view of how culturally constructed replications of such imagination may come to overshadow “the kingdom within.” It opens on a hunting scene:
Of youth transfigured in the deer,
A pair newly mated, and the awful
Hours between X and Y, all
In a clearing, a white elliptical
Stand of birches surrounding,
Observe the harm already done
And the risk of harms greater still.
Both the deer and the hunter are “youth transfigured”: The deer is changed from creature to staged object as the hunter’s imagination transforms its consciousness through the same event. The audience condition projected onto the trees gives the scene the second transfiguring quality of a cultural rite of passage. The “awful / Hours between X and Y” evoke both the formulaic construction of the hunter’s waiting for what seems like a deepening of selfhood and the interval’s anticipation and tension. Therefore, as the stanza’s ending remarks, the violence and consequences of the act are already present in their premeditation. On the one hand, severing human “youth” from other creatures’ unconscious manner of “desiring” their maturity is unavoidable; we live in cocreating cultures. On the other hand, a practice that harms the better part of the life that survives forebodes replication of its initiatory violence. Human complexity lies in the concurrent existence of both levels of psyche — along with the deeper level from which the poet perceives them.
Characterizing the shot as “heat lightning,” the phrase a misnomer that misunderstands the distance and source of the actual lightning, indicates the hunter’s dissociation from the act. An inner separation takes place between what he is told to experience and the more complete understanding that includes his soul’s perceptions and intuitions. The auditory “Distant sirens” parallel the bifurcation, while also evoking the tragic lure of the mythic figures and the intuitive fear of punishment. This is, indeed, a turning point:
Youth is helpless unless, transfigured
Between X and Y, it imagines
A new animal and becomes
The twin of itself with malice.
Imagination is the greater harm.
The “new animal” is also a “twin” reference to both the objectified deer and the decentered hunter. Both the double meanings and the evolving complexities within the poem’s repetitions embody the psychological paradox at its heart: Living beings are interconnected, even when our perspectives narrow sufficiently for them to appear as separate. These dual views apply correspondingly to the imagination, shown for its potential to empower cultures of super-predators — within a poem of wholistic imagination that also implies other possibilities. “X and Y” are variables, after all.
“Outrage” approaches these dual potentials through the image of “A new tree uprooted and thrown / Into the street fire” (1). The “new” aspect may invoke each living tree’s relationship to symbols like the Tree of Life or the Christian Cross; however, it also parallels “youth” and new life in general, as in “Distant Sirens.” The burning tree is subjected to the “deformity of fire,” which also recalls the harmful transformations that consciousness can cause to itself and, in the process, to others and our shared environment. These threads form a coherence that resonates throughout the collection:
Justice is a poor sort without
A living tree. Comfort the angry boys
Out of your green air, as once
A stranger tree overpowered hellfire.
Although evoking Christian symbols and theology, these lines weave together a transferable interdependence between just being toward other lives in the world and symbols that must be lived into being through those conscious acts. The use of “once” captures both the difference and synergy, indicating both the event of the cross at a point in time and the symbol’s presence in the faithful Christian psyche at each current moment.
We may perceive the inner dynamics of such symbols in the unfolding complexities of “Epicurean,” beginning with the personification of “The misbelieving,” which equates with another deformed life, “a leaf caught fire out of frost.” We confront a quotidian malaise: “It is the same tree, always the same, / And never time enough for actual blossom” (55). A spark of new life enters in a “Cabbage moth” that is “as glad of frost as of fire”: “Wings are wings, given to gladness as to weightlessness / In favor of flight.”
However, an honest recollection of despair juxtaposes this projection of Edenic innocence:
I was heavy and absent at the end,
The kill in cold or in desolating fever
Made an imbecile of me — nothing to choose between,
Nothing to distinguish but colors fading into luxury.
One perspective precedes awareness of suffering; the other is confined by it. Yet, in a synthesis that has somehow survived “the end” as it seemed during the illness, Revell reconnects the two: “Every leaf is a model, every moth a cardiac event / Of empty air shown not to be empty, but killing / At blossom time, heavy with faith and scent.” The leaf as “model” is both created in likeness and exemplary, shedding new light on “the same tree” as a dynamic bond of connection. Likewise, the “cardiac event” of the moth, whose weightless flights evoke imagination, presents potentials for both connection to the heart — and its failing. Within these contexts, “killing at blossom time” might indicate the transformative acceptance of death within life, its unexpected opening of compassion, “heavy with faith and scent.” The images of the poem’s ecosystem continually transfigure one another, a mirror of the witnessing soul’s returns to itself through the world.
A similar mutually reinvigorating interdependence takes place within the reader who spends time with these poems, thought and feeling, natural grounding and intuitive spark, constellating in unique awakenings on each page. Such integral reading and listening, fittingly, is a central aspect of the faith modeled in these poems. If we read Revell the way Revell reads, we will deepen our considerations of our own consciousness of creation — and our gratitude for the connection to deeper being present in the reflection.
[Published by Alice James Books on June 11, 2024, 71 pages, $24.95 papertback]