“ Rivard’s poems move with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation. The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill.”
Some of You Will Know
by David Rivard
The wry, wise, funny, and reflective poems in David Rivard’s seventh book, Some of You Will Know, take a hard yet affectionate look at the games we play with ourselves. They are sure to mystify with all the things they know about the world: “To make room for air/ in his chest when he cries a crow/ has to hunch his wings/ and breathe deep”. Even more unsettling is how well they appear to know us: “You all,/ all of you/ say you don’t know/ what’s wrong/ with you, but/ of course you do,/ you have to.” A delicate sense of being “within earshot” governs this book, allowing the poems to be both perishable and fundamentally timeless. Elemental claims emerge from moments that, however splendid, are merely human, as ordinary and repetitive and passing as the tides. These poems are, after all, the product not simply of a desire to write, but of a life lived, and actually seen and felt.
David Rivard
David Rivard is the author of six previous books, including Standoff, Sugartown, Wise Poison, and Torque. His work has won the PEN/New England Prize in poetry, the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2006, he was given the O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize by the Folger Shakespeare Library in recognition of both his writing and teaching. He lives on the coast of Maine.
“Some of You Will Know refreshes an old sense of the lyric in which the soliloquy dares to have something to do with anyone who might be within earshot. Somehow, the poems hang suspended in a beautiful, tenacious, woodsy silence. I can hear the time the poet has waited for revelations in between the revelations, the time the poet has waited with the silence for language to emerge. David Rivard is that rare thing – an American at home in such quiet. At the most lucid moments in these poems, I feel scared in a good way. Some of You Will Know is a daring, unique book. It’s as suspenseful as a crime drama. It’s the moment before the monks dismantle the mandala. It’s as miraculous as a tattoo on moving water. It’s as unbelievable and needed in this day and age as a letter from the future, which, of course, it is.”
“His aerial sentences defy the pull of line breaks, then snap down into epigrammatic, end-stopped closure, like birds diving over open ocean for rare prey; his subject is our unrealistic aspirations, the ways we can feel dead without them, and the ways poetic language can incubate and give wings to strange ambitions.”
“[Standoff] assailed me with its vivaciousness and cunning humor.”
“David Rivard’s Standoff is a beautiful book of political elegies….This isn’t a project. This is a collection of poems meant to show how the world leaves us fragmented, poems united here to remind us how we nevertheless continue whole.”
