Collected Poems
596
Collected Poems
596eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819573421 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2013 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 596 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
DAVID LEHMAN
In 2002, when two Pleiades editors solicited work for Dark Horses, an anthology of unjustly neglected poets, I was not the only contributor who put in for Joseph Ceravolo, but my hand went up first, and I got to praise this overlooked genius of American poetry.1 A master of lyric concision, Ceravolo enjoyed a stronger connection to childhood and the child's perception of the universe than any poet since Theodore Roethke. In the 1960s and early 1970s, which appears to have been his Abstract Expressionist period, he used simple words and phrases but linked them unusually or leaped elliptically to achieve a sublime innocence. A six-line poem begins: "O moon / How ghost you are." A liberal use of exclamation points and a crafty sureness in the line-breaks contribute to the effect, as in the close of an early poem: "How are / you growing? / No better to in a stranger. / Shack, village, / brother, / wild provoke of the endurance sky!" All the pathos of childhood informs the moment in "Ho Ho Ho Caribou" when the speaker says, "Like a flower, little light, you open / and we make believe / we die." In short, Ceravolo was a homegrown original, possessing an utterly distinctive style.
The claims I would make for Ceravolo today are as great, and now there is twice as much evidence to back them up. Until now, only a limited portion of his work — the mostly small-press editions that appeared between 1965 and 1982 — has seen the light of day. Edited by Rosemary Ceravolo, the poet's widow, and Parker Smathers, the Collected Poems gathers the far-flung fugitives and adds the crown upon the his lifetime's effort. During the last twelve years of his life, Ceravolo accumulated several hundred pages of poetry, some titled, some not, almost all dated, and under the working title Mad Angels: 1976–1988. It is the appearance of these poems that makes this a particularly momentous occasion. We will, in the light of the Collected, need to revise upwards, not only our estimate of Ceravolo's achievement, but also our understanding of his singular place in modern American poetry.
Born in the Astoria section of Queens, New York, in 1934, the first son of immigrant parents from Calabria, Italy, Ceravolo graduated from City College in 1954 and began writing poetry while serving in the U. S. Army in Germany three years later. He wrote poems while on all-night guard duty in a stockade tower. A civil engineer by trade, he took Kenneth Koch's writing class at the New School in New York City in 1959. Koch's teaching had a strong and lasting influence on him. Frank O'Hara called him "one of the most important poets around," and it was fitting that Ceravolo's debut collection, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, won the first Frank O'Hara Award in 1968.2 (Koch and John Ashbery judged the award named after their late friend.) It is a book I have long loved, and it would suffice to establish Ceravolo's reputation even if, in his clandestine way, he hadn't added to it substantially in subsequent years. The publicity-shy poet lived quietly with his wife and three children in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He had a powerful dislike of the "phony." He was fifty-four when he died of an inoperable tumor on September 4, 1988.
In 1994, The Green Lake Is Awake, a volume of his selected poems, was published with an admiring foreword by Kenneth Koch. According to Koch, a Ceravolo poem was a sort of "amazing perceptual archeology," its effect almost mystical. "It faded like the mirage of a gorgeous building: then, as soon as I reread it, it was there again," Koch wrote. He singled out some of the linguistic "oddnesses" in Ceravolo's poems: disjointed phrases and incomplete statements, which occur often in a "context of simplicity, quietness, and directness." Koch pointed to the materiality of the language in such a poem as "Drunken Winter," quoted here in full from Spring in This World of Poor Mutts:
Oak oak! like like it then cold some wild paddle so sky then;
flea you say
"geese geese" the boy June of winter of again Oak sky
In these and other poems of that period, the words seem as physical as objects and as strange. It's as if the poet were practicing, naturally and without calculation, a sophisticated poetics of substitution, erasure, and merger, suggestive of meanings beyond the powers of paraphrase.
If Ceravolo remains a secret ardor, it is in part because he resisted calling attention to himself and in part because the New York School, with which his name is associated, has not yet received its full due from academic critics. I love his simplicity — his apparent simplicity, I should say. In reality Ceravolo is, as he writes in his poem "Happiness in the Trees," "no more / simple than a cedar tree / whose children change / the interesting earth / and promise to shake her / before the wind blows / away from you / in the velocity of rest." The full complexity of his personality is on display in the writing he did — sometimes with an air of improvisation — in "Mad Angels."
A spiritual journey in verse, an unedited transcript of a poet's embrace of all things, from nature in its glory to his own mortality, "Mad Angels" will astonish even devoted admirers. It turns out this poet of laconic grace was also a secretly prolific practitioner of daily writing in the approved New York School manner, except that he sounds like no other member of the tribe, even when he writes an elegy for Ted Berrigan ("there are no special worlds / for a poet when / he dies or when you die / he goes where you go"), when he relates a boyhood memory ("When I was a child / I thought a handgun in a holster / and the lead-colored bullets on the belt / was one of the most beautiful things / made by man"), when he initiates a self-styled serenade with an exclamatory "Ah shit!" or when a garbage truck collides with the blinding sun on a city street, yielding an unexpected epiphany. Here is the whole of "Sun." Note the strategic use of blank space in the third line:
A garbage truck across the road turns into the traffic, the avenue a burst of solar blindness.
It is the birthday of the universe.
Ceravolo is unusual among contemporary poets in the depth of his spirituality. "The Holy Ghost is in my nerves," he writes. Transgressions rhyme with confessions, "holy lightning in the forest" with "mea culpa on the chest." The liturgy of morning includes "ecstasy," "eternity," and "benediction," but also a fair amount of "dirt," as in the poem of that title from July 1982:
Dirt on shoes The simple life When fears come like a trembling of rocks the earthquake is my bride
The sought-for ecstasy is as real as it is crude in "Body Jet," where the poet is watching a bird in its flight:
Weeping at the crude greatness ready to take off on the wetness all alone
I burn at the take off so invisible a god, off the ground into air I moan
It's the most crude thing of fears I have ever seen in life this emulation of strife of a bird
Although it scares the shit out of me it is close to ecstasy
Ceravolo's poems are greater than the sum of his influences, which in his case would seem to embrace the Gospels and the Catholic liturgy, William Blake's prophetic poems ("A vestal virgin melts the sword of communism / a large spider / dissolves the temptation of capitalism / both drowned by a sunbeam"), Shelley ("as if I finally / understand you / creator, destroyer, preserver"), William Carlos Williams ("A frog is kissing / surface of the water / from underneath"), Gerard Manly Hopkins ("Be uncovered! / Hoe with look life!"), Zen ("Without god there is no god. / Forget everything!"), and the poets of the New York School ("This morning Walt Whitman / walked past me / Ed Poe sat next to me with a coffee / Emmy Dickinson watched / TV with me in amazement").
A "Street Wise Romantic," as he puts it in the title of a late poem, Ceravolo is alone with a universe of death and mystery, unreported miracles and unobserved raptures. He attends alone and unobserved when, for example, a "hero" is buried —"a county policeman / shot on interstate 280 while / stopping a car"— in as affecting and unorthodox an elegy as I have encountered in many years ("Libera Me"). There is the love of "Amor & Psyche" where "there still remains the kiss / like the fires of a candle, / or a forest in seclusion, / or a migration lost for ages." But in the land of unlikeness it is the life of the spirit that is chronicled. The poet alone hears "songs that even nightingales / didn't know / or even the gods learned / for their created." The "you" in his poems is vast, divine, and worthy of prayer. "Deliver me in the pure waters / of sudden joy / when for no reason / it be OK to die / and never return."
Ceravolo's poems are lean, full of working nouns and verbs stripped of modifiers. He is unafraid to end a poem abruptly. He can move from whimsy to high tension in a line. He favors the vernacular yet speaks of the gods as Hölderlin might. He is on intimate terms with the wind and the sun and is able to "rejoice / in [his] deximil / of time." Yet none of this finally explains the magic of these poems — how they transform the commonplace into the extraordinary or why they make this reader feel he is in the presence of a natural poet, for whom poetry came as freely as leaves to the tree. His last poems are heartbreakingly beautiful.
No one sees me. I am just here,
my foot a decoy for compassion my sympathies and despairs for another generation to find.
Excerpted from "Collected Poems"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Estate of Joseph Ceravolo.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Table of Contents
<P>TRANSMITIGATION SOLO (1960 – 1965)<BR>Preface<BR>Lost Words<BR>Life of Freedom<BR>Sleep in Park<BR>Descending the Slope<BR>Feast of Visions<BR>Floating Gardens<BR>The Women<BR>Lights of Childhood<BR>Romance of Awakening<BR>Invisible Autumn<BR>Metaphorical Desert<BR>Celebration<BR>O Heart Uncovered<BR>His Universe Eyes<BR>Pain Songs<BR>Migratory Noon<BR>Contrast<BR>Dinosaurs of Pain<BR>Frozen Lookout<BR>Stolen Away<BR>Starting Up Again<BR>White Sky<BR>Chains of Mountains<BR>Resting<BR>Pastoral<BR>Transmigration Solo<BR>In Full View of Sappho<BR>Spell of Eternity<BR>Note from St. Francis<BR>"WATER: HOW WEATHER FEELS THE COTTON HOTELS"<BR>FITS OF DAWN (1965)<BR>Introduction<BR>BOOK I<BR>Part 1<BR>Part 2<BR>Part 3<BR>BOOK II<BR>Part 1<BR>Part 2<BR>BOOK III<BR>"The green lake is awake..."<BR>The Crocus turn of the gods<BR>A story from the Bushmen<BR>"SEA LEVEL"<BR>WILD FLOWERS OUT OF GAS (1967)<BR>Rain<BR>White Fish in Reeds<BR>In the Desert<BR>The Wind Is Blowing West<BR>Indian Suffering<BR>Warmth<BR>A Song of Autumn<BR>Funny Day<BR>Spring of Work Storm<BR>Autumn-Time, Wind and the Planet Pluto<BR>A Story in Winter<BR>The Plant Is Growing<BR>End<BR>Drunken Winter<BR>Skies<BR>Is It Impossible to Know Where the Impulse Has Originated?<BR>Not a Baby<BR>Wild Provoke of the Endurance Sky<BR>Dangers of the Journey to the Happy Land<BR>In My Crib<BR>Don't Break It<BR>Spring<BR>Happiness in the Trees<BR>The Book of Wild Flowers<BR>SPRING IN THIS WORLD OF POOR MUTTS (1968)<BR>It Is Morning<BR>Caught in the Swamp<BR>After the Rain<BR>Dusk<BR>Heart Feels the Water<BR>Lighthouse<BR>May<BR>Cool Breeze<BR>Ocean<BR>In the Grass<BR>Ho Ho Ho Caribou<BR>Red Sun<BR>Fill and Illumined<BR>Noise Outside<BR>Winter Song<BR>When the First Tree Blossoms<BR>Passivation<BR>Doubts<BR>Before It Is Destroyed<BR>Nothing<BR>Floods<BR>Sculpture<BR>Passion for the Sky<BR>Road of Trials<BR>Pregnant, I Come<BR>Both Close by Me, Both<BR>Spring in This World of Poor Mutts<BR>Data<BR>Autumn Break<BR>Lonely in the Park<BR>Football<BR>Tripod<BR>I Like to Collapse<BR>Down<BR>Soul in Migration<BR>Polar Flower<BR>Orchard<BR>Struggling<BR>Grow<BR>Risk<BR>Fly<BR>Mountains<BR>The Green Lake Is Awake<BR>THE HELLGATE (1969 – 1975)<BR>Part I—Testament<BR>Part II—Departure<BR>Part III—The Bridge of the Dead<BR>Part VI—Purification<BR>"INTERIOR OF THE POEM" (1979)<BR>INRI (1979)<BR>O Moon<BR>Alone Swollen<BR>Another World<BR>Question Haunting<BR>Birth Day<BR>Vision<BR>Live Today<BR>Perched<BR>Promontory<BR>Bloodsucker<BR>Rampant God<BR>Earth<BR>Trouble<BR>Experience<BR>Hotel<BR>Space Out<BR>Mistake<BR>Apology<BR>No Help<BR>Freedom<BR>Within<BR>Dangerous Journey<BR>Worse Enemy<BR>Not One<BR>Fable<BR>Bad Ass<BR>Mixture<BR>Broken<BR>Layout<BR>Reborn<BR>Futura<BR>Internal Rays<BR>Apocalypse<BR>Awareness<BR>Macro<BR>Rising Sound<BR>Hard or Soft<BR>Lighting Up<BR>Job<BR>The Car<BR>Beyond Phony<BR>Inside<BR>Unable to Move<BR>Pass Me By<BR>Hard Energy<BR>Motion<BR>Stupor<BR>Cuando Amenecer El Sol<BR>Spring Breeze<BR>Sleeping One<BR>Hunting<BR>This Land<BR>Old Friend Hung<BR>The Gods in Me<BR>Future Landscape<BR>Imaginary Styx<BR>Disasters<BR>End of the World<BR>Reality Printed<BR>Marginal Existence<BR>Footing<BR>Continuum<BR>If I Can't<BR>River Flooded<BR>The Forest Wetness<BR>Non-spacial<BR>Runs Me Over<BR>Flight<BR>But<BR>To Seed<BR>Manure<BR>A Cave Man's Dream<BR>Ritual<BR>Basic Heart<BR>The Winds of the Comet<BR>Negative Mountain Peak<BR>Infinite Thunder<BR>Ghost of Spring<BR>MILLENIUM DUST (1982)<BR>WINDS OF THE COMET• Volcano Tears<BR>Bright Sun<BR>Wet Sand<BR>Cross Fire<BR>Savage Nocturne<BR>A Last Song<BR>Spiral<BR>Geological Hymn<BR>Barbaric<BR>The Catskills<BR>Today's Night<BR>Sleeping by the Rocks<BR>Drunk on the Brain<BR>The Spirit Mercury<BR>Rhythm<BR>White Dwarf<BR>Inside Story<BR>Escape to Atlantis<BR>Winds of the Comet<BR>Survival<BR>Fire of Myself<BR>Body of Earth<BR>Not Afraid of the Dark<BR>Generations of Clouds<BR>Waves Apart<BR>Cooling Galaxy<BR>The Rocket<BR>APOLLO IN THE NIGHT<BR>Storm Breaking Over<BR>Hills<BR>Night Wander<BR>Cold Night Alone<BR>Morning Insults<BR>Conception<BR>Milky Ways<BR>Time on Earth<BR>Instantaneous Takes Time<BR>That's Where It Is<BR>Projection<BR>Star Song<BR>Earthquake<BR>Voice on My Birthday<BR>Inland<BR>Illuminant before Dawn<BR>Late Birds<BR>Summer Lightning<BR>Perpetual Life<BR>Apollo in the Night<BR>Great Plains<BR>A Railway Stop<BR>Night Birds<BR>MILLENIUM DUST<BR>Longer Trip<BR>Dawn Hunt<BR>Cardinal Conjunction<BR>Sacred and Profane<BR>Ignition of Dawn<BR>Body Weight<BR>Hymn to Earth<BR>Kyrie Eleison<BR>Can't Sleep<BR>New Realism<BR>Good Friday<BR>Mood<BR>Birth in the Dunes<BR>Shifting Lives<BR>Fever<BR>Tensions<BR>Meadowlands<BR>Gravity Awakening<BR>To Open Regions<BR>Reversals<BR>Unemployment<BR>Full Bloom<BR>Not Really Punishment<BR>Nude Madness<BR>Crazy Death<BR>Park Thoughts<BR>Concealed Wound<BR>Ocean Body<BR>Glass and Steel Structures<BR>The New World<BR>No More People<BR>Brook<BR>Millenium Dust<BR>Montauk<BR>Unfinished Sonnet<BR>Dirty Snow<BR>Tidelands<BR>Final Dimensions<BR>After Image<BR>MAD ANGELS (1976 – 1988)<BR>1976 – 1982<BR>Body Jet<BR>Love Eyes<BR>What It's Like<BR>Espacio<BR>Haunting Ghosts<BR>Rte 3 into N.Y.<BR>Just at the Beginning of Summer<BR>Scope<BR>Words from a Young Father (Leaving Body)<BR>Requiem<BR>April Already<BR>Assimilation in the Streets of This City<BR>Night Ride<BR>"In one day everything's green..."<BR>Holy<BR>Railway Box (Deo Te Salve)<BR>Tongues<BR>"The night gets lonely..."<BR>Crazy in the Night<BR>Mayhem<BR>"Taking me away..."<BR>Sub-Scape<BR>Signals<BR>Apology<BR>"Tie one on, tie it on..."<BR>Supplication<BR>Positive Disintegration<BR>Aurora<BR>Lament #1<BR>Lament #2<BR>Asia<BR>Middle of Winter (off the Hudson)<BR>Dirt<BR>Sunset<BR>"It only takes a machine..."<BR>Verses of the Soul Suffering to See God<BR>1983<BR>Rain Forest Ode<BR>Earth So Beautiful<BR>Dominica<BR>Forest Dreams<BR>Over Music<BR>"Hold me light, hold me tight..."<BR>To the Death of a Poet<BR>Long Sonnet<BR>"Where have I got time..."<BR>City Scape<BR>Double Blind Concerto<BR>Guitar Ode<BR>"The first August day is over..."<BR>Sunburn<BR>Linear Ballad<BR>The Amphibian<BR>"Rain cycle, hold my brains..."<BR>"I hear the music from below..."<BR>It's Only Glue<BR>Builders or Large Moon Rise<BR>"Here's a traveler in the womb..."<BR>Spirit Matter<BR>Tones<BR>"All winter the..."<BR>Night Flash<BR>"Do a little job..."<BR>1984<BR>"The squirrel leaping frightens..."<BR>"Sunny day with ice..."<BR>Fault<BR>Planet Sonnet<BR>Lament No. 3<BR>Forgive<BR>City<BR>Spring Rise<BR>Grand Jury<BR>Indian Song<BR>Release<BR>Jet Resurrection<BR>Mother Land<BR>Above Clouds Above<BR>Legacy<BR>"The pains of children..."<BR>"Where am I now?..."<BR>Serenade No. 1<BR>Why God Should Know the Gods<BR>War<BR>Silent<BR>"Floating emotions..."<BR>"O ancient Rivers..."<BR>Pre-Christian<BR>Simple Creation I<BR>"Minor eruptions in the air..."<BR>Dead Sea Scrolls<BR>"If I left..."<BR>"The migration flaps..."<BR>Hermit Gambler<BR>Alive<BR>Woods<BR>Dirty Benediction<BR>Elegy<BR>Toxic Wastes<BR>Autumn Torches<BR>Libera Me<BR>"I lean on my bus..."<BR>"How can I disconnect..."<BR>Sonnet<BR>Stay<BR>Thanksgiving Day<BR>"O world without light..."<BR>Street Wise Romantic<BR>Lament #4<BR>A Piece of Glass<BR>"Happy heart that sows the breeze..."<BR>1985<BR>"My intellect seems to breathe..."<BR>If You Loved Me<BR>Love Song<BR>"Seagulls are in from the sea..."<BR>Pages of Storms<BR>Hungry<BR>"Tile floor, open glass..."<BR>Street Journal<BR>"Dried up and dogged..."<BR>Unfinished<BR>Century Sonnet<BR>"I'm not weeping and weeping..."<BR>Freedom<BR>Hospital<BR>"This is not the place I want to be..."<BR>Incantation<BR>Pumping Iron<BR>"'Du bist in meinen Blut'..."<BR>Reggae-Mine<BR>Courage<BR>Morning Vespers<BR>"9:01..."<BR>Notoriety<BR>"The streets against their stomachs..."<BR>Night Strokes<BR>BMX<BR>Forecast<BR>Ignorance Strong<BR>Narrative Night<BR>"On a night in a distant country..."<BR>"I am not able to move..."<BR>Sonnet<BR>Hidden Bird<BR>Lament #5<BR>Lethal Sonnet<BR>"Closer and closer to the ground..."<BR>Rain & Wolves Inhabit Me<BR>All at Once<BR>Life Sentence<BR>"There is no way..."<BR>Dragons and Dungeons<BR>Ode Song<BR>Mad Angels<BR>One<BR>The City<BR>Ode<BR>Dream Ode<BR>"Dry leaves, light trees..."<BR>Travelin' Blue Highway<BR>People's Republic<BR>"Volcano mud covering exquisite bodies..."<BR>REAL #1<BR>Marketeers Entwined<BR>The Comet Returns<BR>Litanical<BR>The Muscles of Animals<BR>First Snow<BR>Hymn<BR>1986<BR>New Year<BR>"Where are we headed?..."<BR>Melody for Food<BR>Morning Touched<BR>Mid Ocean<BR>Lyric<BR>"Lazy bodies with hidden knives..."<BR>Rifle Shot<BR>Winter<BR>Amor & Psyche<BR>Portrait Painter Realistic<BR>Stampeding Visualizations<BR>"Calm me!..."<BR>"The Great Lakes are rising..."<BR>Darkness Ode<BR>Thoughts<BR>Modern Sorrows<BR>"I walked out. It was raining..."<BR>Now<BR>"Turn me around in your hands, O wind!..."<BR>"I have a bad day today..."<BR>"Looking at beetles and ants..."<BR>"Smoke rises like claws that lock me in..."<BR>Crescent Moon<BR>Reprieve<BR>"The purple plant, leaves thick..."<BR>Hymn to Rain<BR>Bad Thoughts<BR>"I work in a dreamscape of reality..."<BR>Characters<BR>Come Clean<BR>Complaint<BR>Someone<BR>Still Life<BR>Morning<BR>"The best time is when the body..."<BR>"Song birds..."<BR>Nuclear Disaster<BR>"Does loneliness take over the body..."<BR>World War II<BR>"Route 3 and lonely..."<BR>Mass<BR>Discovery<BR>Angelic Meditation<BR>Week Day<BR>Hand Gun<BR>"Between a rock and a hard place..."<BR>"Am I a fool in the temperate sun..."<BR>Subway<BR>"Old world, there are roads in front..."<BR>"Grind away, trumpet, beat away..."<BR>"How could the comet be..."<BR>Breeze<BR>Traffic Sonnet<BR>"Under high tension towers..."<BR>"Hardly a lightening flies overhead..."<BR>Spirit<BR>Blues<BR>Der Wanderer<BR>"My deepness away from you..."<BR>"What is a year ending?..."<BR>"Overpayment, underpayment, Florida lakes..."<BR>Observation<BR>"It is cold, it is cloudy..."<BR>1987<BR>"Consecrate the birds..."<BR>Winter Sonnet<BR>Hymn<BR>A Child Story<BR>"I saw a red tail hawk..."<BR>Mother & Father (Simple)<BR>Hotline for Youth<BR>"As if snow could cleanse..."<BR>Subway Walkman<BR>Today's Benediction<BR>"It's the quiet that we..."<BR>"Tundra and deer, liberty and fear..."<BR>Search<BR>Bird<BR>Sun<BR>Notes on the 20th Century Scientist<BR>"'Crazy nut,' the girls said..."<BR>Sublimation<BR>Unseen Sonnet<BR>A Young Couple<BR>"Morning breaks..."<BR>OK<BR>Cat of Eternity<BR>Meditation<BR>"The multitudes betray the fallen city..."<BR>Irish Entry<BR>A Call<BR>"Slowly my love..."<BR>An Old Testament<BR>Rain Driven<BR>Koyaanisqatsi<BR>To a Dogwood Tree<BR>Beginner Method<BR>"The morning is warm..."<BR>Kin Pain<BR>Spark<BR>"Dark inside me every day..."<BR>"Take away the hours of creation..."<BR>"Tunnels are closed..."<BR>Perpetual<BR>"Somewhere between a missile..."<BR>"Million dreams, billion nights..."<BR>"My arms are heavy and I feel..."<BR>"Too many times there is..."<BR>"Resurrect, reserve, resound..."<BR>December<BR>"Thank the gods for life..."<BR>Starvation<BR>"Hidden underground in a frame..."<BR>1988<BR>"All the stars will be gone..."<BR>Irish Entry<BR>"Swamps and people live in a lake..."<BR>"Turn the screw, bang the nail..."<BR>"8:27, have a language, that bundles..."<BR>"When you can choke off the under-..."<BR>"A man listens to music next to me..."<BR>"Happy heart that sows the breeze..."<BR>"Song birds enter the morning..."<BR>"When I think of all the fuckin' hours..."<BR>"When a spirit comes to me..."</P>What People are Saying About This
“To read the poems of Joseph Ceravolo is to stride in radiance and through a coronal of colors, all of them tender. And yet his tenderness and the purity of his vision are not fragile, not ephemeral. Ceravolo is the strongest of American poets, the Villon of our apocalypse. His color is words, but his shape is the shape of action.”
“Joseph Ceravolo’s poetry, like the very best poetry, is at once timeless and contemporary, magical and truthful, visionary and real. One never ceases to be moved and astonished by his highly original poetics. His work is always revelatory. Always.”
"Joseph Ceravolo's poetry, like the very best poetry, is at once timeless and contemporary, magical and truthful, visionary and real. One never ceases to be moved and astonished by his highly original poetics. His work is always revelatory. Always."—Peter Gizzi
"To read the poems of Joseph Ceravolo is to stride in radiance and through a coronal of colors, all of them tender. And yet his tenderness and the purity of his vision are not fragile, not ephemeral. Ceravolo is the strongest of American poets, the Villon of our apocalypse. His color is words, but his shape is the shape of action.""—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems