"Revell demonstrates his spontaneity and his unmediated, often delighted, relationship to nature ...each [poem] is a momentary conjunction of faith with language, addressed with a pellucid power that invites even unprepared readers to join in."
--Publishers Weekly

"Like every great American transcendentalist, Donald Revell writes with a drunken equipoise among the weedy flowers and bees of roadside museums and vacant churches. After over a hundred years of dreadful demystification, here are poems that border the hereafter and revive the child's play of prophecy. What miraculous assistance they provide!"
--Dean Young

"Ecstasy, saints, kids, bees, ecological warnings both piano and forte, sonnets of reverie and welcome, talking statues, and a bevy of precursors join the leaftime, the ring-time, of this unparalleled collection. Having worked--in his terrific earlier books--through intellectual fear and temporal need, in Drought-Adapted Vine, Revell now shows how he also lives in Eden: you can join him there."
--Stephanie Burt

"Like the bee, the trued eye of the poet is compound. Donald Revell has such an eye. For those of us devoted to his poems, we see through his eyes--not simply the repeated flower in every cell of vision, but compound more complexly: the flower in time next to the flower in eternity, wonder of the daily chore next to the awe of boundlessness. And like the bee, the poet's toil is to keep the field entire intact. Drought-Adapted Vine is growing in this field, flourishing even as the element of its growth diminishes. It has adapted, as has the poet, who knows what he shows: that the past is at deep work in the pasture. And there one labors--not on time's behalf, nor in denial of time--there where the grass is 'giving live birth to grass, ' there where the holy command is to 'put it together, ' so that the daily can remain at play in the pastoral, where the morning light still is always the morning light."
--Dan Beachy-Quick

"The bright light of faith and the brighter lights of the outdoors have never shone more than they do in Revell's recent work, which recommends the imminent glory of every small thing..."
--American Poets

"Lenore Marshall Prize Revell has a rigorous yet tender way of imparting his search for the divine, particularly within the beauties of the seen world, so that his poems surely transcend inspirational or pastoral lyrics. Here he accepts peaceably what we know and what we can't: "Hence and farewell valediction: 'life's journey.'/ It makes no sense.""
--Library Journal

"[Revell] has crafted a poetry that lets him 'live outwardly, ' embrace the unfolding, enjoy even its darkest surprises, and let go of what is 'left behind. ...'"
--Craig Morgan