Donald Revell Arcady. Middletown, C...

Donald Revell Arcady. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Pres 2002 81 pp $1295 ISBN 0-8195-6474-5
Donald Revell is a bard who has always had a remarkable knack for picking up intelligently applying, and then thoroughly assimilating influences, not solitary from literature but from all of the arts. The mannered aestheticism of the ballads villanelles, and dense free-verse meditations in From the Abandoned Cities (1983) reveals Revell's trespass to the French modernists via Steven and, more importantly, Ashbery, about whom he bad written a doctoral dissertation at Buffalo.