Bewitched Playground

Of David Rivard’s previous poetry collection, Heather McHugh wrote, “On the Wise Poison trip, a reader books passage to the unpredictable, and at every turn might wonder ‘How did I get here?’” His latest collection, Bewitched Playground, takes Rivard’s readers to new unpredictable territories including fatherhood and domesticity, places that Rivard’s wit and imagination infuse with humor, tenderness, and brimming complexity.

A kind of “public dreaming” takes place via the music of these poems—a music as likely to visit the long-dead ghosts of the Kwakiutl tribe as Gianni Versace, and as interested in the baby seat of a car as it is with a boxing ring. Building on the critical success of Rivard’s two earlier, award-winning books, Bewitched Playground widens both his emotional aperture and formal range. Rivard calls it “my book of domestic voodoo”—not a book about having a child, but written out of a life touched by a new intimacy, and tuned-in to an unwilled strangeness, a fluctuating gravity.

Here, the unconscious forces of the imagination intersect with everyday details, in a crossroads at the bewitched playground. These stylistically innovative poems are full of the rediscovery that the world teems with “otherness,” with freshness and surprise.