Invisible Green

by Donald Revell

Invisible Green: Selected Prose begins with the series of nine essays published in American Poetry Review , essays which enact intimate and yet capacious converse with, and among, an array of writers. Quoted works become provocations for this poet's examination of language and humanness, an examination that disrupts our more comfortable notions while extending insights as to the nature and necessity of poetry. The elegant immediacy of Revell's prose belies the complex virtuosity he demonstrates in his manipulation of the essay's formal constraints as he incorporates the works of writers with whom we may well be familiar, but whose texts will become newly illuminated by the exchange. Besides this series, the collection includes eight more essays-their subjects range from lively considerations of the writings of Henry Thoreau, Pierre Reverdy, Ronald Johnson, John Ashbery and others, to more personal essays in which Revell examines the interrelationships between language and life, memory