My Mojave

by Donald Revell. Alice James Books, 80 pp. (paper), $13.95. In troubled times, the artist faces a familiar predicament. Between the poles of speech and silence, there's a calculable risk: speak directly of public matters and one may compromise one's art; say nothing and compromise the soul. For Revell as for other poets, the pastoral tradition and its attendant challenge to cultural complacency becomes a veritable force-field. With My Mojave, Revell's eighth collection, the poet turns his concerns to "famines" of feeling, to deserts real and metaphorical: "No birds today / Except hawks keeping / A brown watch / Over no prey," he writes in "To the Destroyers of Ballots," one of numerous poems exploring the vagaries and vacancies at the heart of civic life.

Set against the backdrop of the post-9/ 11 world marked by "strange new flight paths," "'anonymous tips" as well as "Anthrax and explosions," Revell maps the effects of urbanity's infringements on the individual spirit. "The news was far, then close. / Something had towered above the sky, / And now the sky was alone," he writes in the fragmented sequence "Given Days," where the nature of private and public loss is explored through anecdotes and associations, "poetic" speech and sound bite, a familiar yet effective strategy to capture and critique the simultaneity of contemporary life. In Revell's hands, borrowed language (Traherne, Marvell, Dorothy Wordsworth, and others) appears to be as much a part of "nature" as the literal landscape the poet inhabits.

Governed by a roving intellect and concise description, My Mojave possesses the immediacy and reflective energy of the verse journal. Like Thoreau (whose presence ghosts the collection), the poet seeks a deliberate way of being: writing on the cusp of the millennium that "Satisfaction glories aloft and my ground / Is brittle winter verbena / Whoever walks on it purges himself/To enter the temples anywhere." Elsewhere, the act of turning a moth away from a candle's flame and into a rain shower becomes a verbal venture: "What a banner for me / Blows / On a moth's wing / Leading me" ("Banner"). As sight leads to insight, the poet discovers that perception is devotion. Revell's intense scrutiny of self and surroundings becomes spiritual reckoning: at the year' s end, cardinals, "The only bird remaining / in bare trees and abandoned nests," are "miserable comforters" whose vivid color in a dark season often appear to be "a stab / Of the grotesque / More than sweet persistence / I should have seen" ("In Christmas"). A rich and rewarding read, My Mojave shows Revell to be an increasingly important poet for our times.

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