"In these intellectual and precise poems, Revell explores the darker side of human progress with inventive language and apt allusions to myth and religion. ... It's a pleasure to see Revell continue to evolve four decades into his illustrious career."
–Publishers Weekly
"Donald Revell's Canandaigua compounds itself of archaic beauty and immediate freshets, of fair vigils of praise and invention. Its dictionary holds the sky for all it is worth and breaks the agendas of waste economies. Gainsaying death, these splendiferous poems invite us to join, to mourn and rejoice."
–Angela Ball
"'Eyesight was a flower when the sun meant something.' Maybe we need a poet–this poet, Donald Revell–to remind us vision isn't made of time, but of light. Then the eye sees across the ages to those binding realities that mark the borders of human love. A kind of paradise–from a poet who hasn't given up on paradise–even as the timely world walks east and skeptically away. The poem, too, is a kind of flower feeding on the sun: line by line the blue vervain grows taller. Or is it deeper? Canandaigua, as few books I know do, gives us both the bloom and the canker. Revell knows we live in 'the death of allegory.' He also knows 'time heals nothing until / Time is no more.' There is, he tells us, a grammar of mountains and trees. I trust him that it is so. I think you might trust him, too. Doing so gives us an extraordinary chance we didn't know we needed, but do: that return to Arcady, where we step to the music we hear, that music that is ourselves."
–Dan Beachy-Quick
"Donald Revell's Canandaigua are poems of resistance, protest, theological quest despite our deepest skepticism. Humane, drawing from a wide range of reference that moves with grace between antiquity and tomorrow, these poems seek our lives' greatest gifts: love and truth. Revell's signature, trenchant, hymnal rhythms, his metaphysical infinitudes, are here as always, accompanying us as we move into new worlds, where Revell has always been waiting."
–Gillian Conoley
