The Art of Attention

Donald Revell argues passionately for the transformation that imaginative experience elicits through poetry. 
“The art of poetry is not about the acquisition of wiles or the deployment of strategies,” Revell writes. “Beginning in the senses, imagination senses farther, senses more.” Using examples from his own poetry and translations and from Blake and Thoreau to Ronald Johnson and John Ashbery, Revell’s The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye takes the writer beyond the workshop and into the world of vision.

Praise for Donald Revell’s poetry:

“Revell is a writer of singular talent and ambition…he takes the reader to unfamiliar and strange places and, in the process, he creates some of the most beautiful poetry in our language.”—Harvard Review

“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 the 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