Pennyweight Windows

“Donald Revell’s selected poems, *Pennyweight Windows*, contains some of the most interesting American poems written in the last twenty years. Revell at his best is a writer of unusual intellectual rigor and great lyrical poignancy: his mind is tuned to adages and axioms, pre-Socratic mind-tricks and the gnomic observations of Thoreau; but he has a big, vulnerable heart that tries to live in our world among our entanglements.” —Poetry

“The new poems, collected along with all the best of the old in Revell’s 2005 career-spanning volume, *Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems*…remind me of James Wright, of music by the Postal Service and Low, of the most beautiful diary in the world: Its desert-burnished gems await you now.” —*City Pages* “2005 Artists of the Year” Issue

“To read this selection from Donald Revell’s 20-plus years of making poems is to witness the evolution of both an individual poet and the poetics of an entire era.” —*Boston Review*

“*Pennyweight Windows* heralds a major reclamation: the right of a poet to be sincere. Revell’s achievement is in his acceptance of the risks of that sincerety. And this is the refreshing fact of these poems, all of them, as different as they are in form across the twenty years of their writing: they make no excuses for us, even in their essential humanity. They discern honestly human barbarism. But over that, they discern and express beauty—in nature, in humanity, and, yes, in God and the human quest to understand him.” —*Speakeasy*

“It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell’s are so fresh, it’s as if he’s the first person ever to do it.” —*TIME Magazine*

“For over twenty years, Donald Revell has used the pastoral as a tool of protest/revolution against violence and war and as a guide to peace, arguing for personal and political growth in precise, delicate lyrics. Includes a new group of poems, and much of the finest work from Revell’s eight previous collections. A major collection from “…an increasingly important poet for our times” (The Antioch Review). “Donald Revell’s spectacular new-and-selected amounts to three very good poetry books for the price of one—the first by a dejected urbanite who thinks he’s watching America, and his own private life, slowly collapse; one by a maker of puzzles, mazes, and spells; and one by an open-hearted, charitable, mystically inclined father, husband, and Christian believer who cherishes southern Nevada. I’d recommend any of those three on their own; the trio is irresistible.” —*The Believer*

“PW said last year that Revell was due for a career retrospective, and this ample and almost shockingly varied cull of poems from eight books rewards that call richly.” —*Publishers Weekly*