The Bitter Withy

Donald Reveil, The Bitter Withy. Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2009.61pp. $15.95At a recent reading from The Bitter Withy, Donald Revell read "Cant Stand It," which begins:I hear the elephant musicOf the playground's rusted swings, and up,Up higher, then down again,Happy children take the sound.No snakes can read.Walking across the ocean,Walking on flowers nowhere to be seen,I walk on gold.When he read the line "No snakes can read," the audience laughed at the non sequitur and Revell smiled winningly. And though it is certainly a non sequitur, the allusion to Eden, following a playground scene, is instructive: The Bitter Withy is focused precisely on linking the material to the metaphysical, the quotidian to the eternal. In "Cant Stand It," Revell grants, "A diamond is a diamond. / A cloud is a cloud that looks like one," but insists, too, that Heaven is actual, a place where the rusty swings of the playground are transfigured so that they "make no sound." In "Lissen," conversely, there are sounds only the dead can hear:There is a sound in birdsongJust before the song,And you can hear it,Though only a few,And those are reflected on lake waterlike beautiful ghostsAlways just at sunrise,Do.Tell the truth exactly, it will makeno sense.The title's place name is a pun on "listen," one that extends to "no sense." The "truth," the miraculous, will not square with our senses. Such sentiment is peppered throughout The Bitter Withy, sometimes as plainly as in the statement, "What I need / Is not to look at all" ("Little Bees"), and in the strange and fine poem, "Drought":Eyesight is nobody.Perspective dies before it lives,And it lives a long time after deathLike birdsong.When I die, I will begin to hearThe higher frequency. . .This skepticism of sense data brings Revell, as ever, very close to Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." These poems do not deny materiality; they insist that everything transcends materiality, that everything that lives is holy.To that end, Revell purchases a good deal of stock in backyard flora and fauna. Flowers and trees, bugs, birds, rabbits, dogs, predators and prey are all "parallel animals," figures of our shared vulnerability to death and of our animal impulse toward destruction, and all holy (as in the poem "Nemesis"). In "Against This Quiet," a moving elegy for the poet's mother that includes phrases from John Ashbery s "Clepsydra," Revell imagines that a dreaming dog- at once a predator and quite literally holy- is chasing a lizard:In the long way back out of sadness,In new dark passages,He accepts miter and tonsure.That's not right.The dog's really killed him.The dog is just as able to accept miter and tonsure as we, and he is as able to kill and be killed. His experience is no different, his blessings and curses no different. This is the argument of The Bitter Withy, and if we accept the premise that every animal's experience on this earth is the same, and add to it a sort of Gnostic insistence that everything contains a soul, the connection between the everyday and the eternal is hard to gainsay.Visionary logic like this is about as far thematically from the New York School as Revell's current home, Las Vegas, is from his Bronx birthplace. But the technique- the playfulness with language, the sharp veering, image to image, idea to idea- certainly marks him as an heir to that group of poets. Meanwhile, Revell professes to be a Christian, and his speakers yearn toward a Christian heaven, which makes him one of very few contemporary poets dealing seriously in any way with Christianity. That fact alone makes Revell's poetry interesting: a heretical New York Schooler who is also a heretical Christian acknowledges his saints thusly (in a poem, "Crickets," dedicated to the memory of Barbara Guest):Saint William Blake, pray for me;Saint Rimbaud, pray for me;Saint Antonin Artaud, burnNew eyes into my headWith a cigarette end. …