Poet Donald Revell's collection titled The Gaza of Winter is told from the point of view of a speaker suffering from great emotional loss and pain. Employing images of contemporary political turbulence in the Middle East, Revell communicates his speaker's individual trauma through collective experience. Revell once explained that he was trying "to find ways to combine private and public experiences, to show how political and social outlook colors private affairs."

In language that is "formal, spare, [and] forceful," Revell manages to avoid the pitfalls of "cliched sorrow," and instead communicates in the voice of one who realizes "the beauty enclosed in his sorrows," wrote Mariann Hofer in Small Press. Characterized by unusual language structure and original adaptation of traditional poetic forms, Revell's collection features manipulated syntax and twists on the sestina, villanelle, and pantoum. "His verse both engages and disengages itself from formal requirements and constraints," wrote Daniel Bosch in the Partisan Review. "One finds language taking splendid chances," observed American Poetry Review critic Marianne Boruch.

Although many critics praised Revell for his innovative use of language, some found the poems difficult to follow at times. "At their most original these poems record uncommon perceptions and strike off sparkling phrases," noted Ben Howard in Poetry. "At their most opaque," he continued, "they leave the patient reader wishing the poet would say what he means." Hofer, however, found that "these aren't tough poems" but rather ones which deserve "to be read slowly in sequence."

Citing the first three poems of Erasures, which are "The Lesson of the Classics, Jeremiah," and "The Massacre of the Innocents," a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that their titles indicate "the sense of doom that pervades" the collection. The reviewer felt the entries in the second section, which contain alternating lines of poetry and prose, to be the strongest.

Revell wrote the entries in Beautiful Shirt while traveling, "in order to make poems entirely dependent upon immediate physical and verbal circumstances." Consequently, these are poems of ideas rather than emotions, poetry "of often blunt, gnomic statements, but also an abundance of thought and dazzling wordplay," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. Elizabeth Gunderson noted in Booklist that Revell inserts a narrator into some of the poems, but Gunderson felt that when "the poem is allowed to stand on its own, Revell's language becomes richer and definitely more delectable."

In reviewing There Are Three: Poems in Poetry, David Wojahn, who considered this collection Revell's best to date, compared the poet's earlier work with his most recent. Wojahn wrote that "what Revell seems to have achieved with There Are Three, is a masterful fusion of his old and new methods; the book is at once stately and edgy, restoring some of the musical fluency of his early work while at the same time continuing to explore the jaggedness and collage-making which have concerned him more recently." Wojahn noted that the death of Revell's father and the birth of his son are reflected in these poems and concluded by calling this collection "the kind which demands rereading."

Revell's collection Arcady: Poems grew from the death of his sister, his only sibling, in 1995. He writes that in mourning, "my native language lapsed. Immediately, I lost my daily care for making poems. It felt fine. Since my words were missing, I couldn't miss a poem." Revell found consolation in the art of Poussin and the writings of Thoreau. Norman Finkelstein wrote in the Chicago Review that he considered Arcady "to be Revell's most beautiful and fully achieved book. Revell goes for broke here: this is a sheerly lyrical collection."

In reviewing My Mojave: Poems, in the Nation, Stephen Burt noted the change in Revell's work over two decades. He noted the "bleak landscapes" of From the Abandoned Cities, the "almost solipsistic dreamscapes" of New Dark Ages, and noted that Erasures and Beautiful Shirt "moved even further from specifics, describing erotic, political and intellectual frustration, and mingling plangency, difficulty and self pity.... There Are Three showed Revell at his most austere." Burt noted that hints of religious faith surface in Arcady, but that as in earlier works, this was a volume about solitude. Burt described the poems of My Mojave as being "expansive, welcoming, easily grasped. ... Revell now seeks a poetry appropriate not only to loneliness but to anger and happiness, not only to freighted symbols but to facts, not only to doubt but to faith. What's more, he seems to have found what he seeks."

Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems includes selections from eight books, as well as a few recent poems. A Publishers Weekly critic commented that readers can observe Revell "retain his talent but change his style, and his prevailing temperament, almost beyond recognition." Rochelle Ratner observed in the Library Journal that the poems of this collection "serve almost as a bridge between the classical imagination and modern poetry."

"I grew up in the Bronx," Revell once told CA, "where very little is beautiful. The only lovely thing in my life for quite a while was our church. It was there that I fell in love with words and the possible order of words through the Book of Common Prayer and through the language of hymns. So my primary interest has remained in the ritual and comforting sequence of words in their orders.

"As to subjects, my major concern is with the relation of objects to both memory and consciousness, and how inanimate things animate the world inside of the mind and heart of an individual. My best poems usually begin from my being taught to remember or to feel by the strong, sudden presence of a particular object in a particular place. As to values, I hope my best poems champion and assert the value of things and of individual memory and, most importantly, the value of language to record and celebrate the relationship between interior life and the exterior world."

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