David Radavich's Canonicals: Love's Hours

I've been reading David Radavich's poems for probably about twenty-five years now, and there's something in his voice that has me hoping for another twenty-five years. There's a meditative quietness and seriousness to his voice that draws me deeper and deeper into his poems and makes me want to know what he and his poems have to tell me about love and time, death and joy.

You hear this voice clearly in Canonicals: Love's Hours, his new chapbook, from Finishing Line Press (available also at Amazon).



Here's one of the poems from Canonicals.


MATINS


Words crawl
into bed with me

and speak of you
even though
you are not here

and the morning
shines alone

even then

one is grateful
for gods who appear
when summoned

or not
summoned

wordless
as the bedsheet

I lean against

a world raucous
in bomb-blasts, rapings,
another bankruptcy for greed

even then

words creep in
through the window

thinking of sun
shining equally in your face


("Matins" first appeared in Lisa Siedlarz's Connecticut River Review.)
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David is also the author of Slain Species (Court Poetry Press, London, 1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood Press, 1998), and Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2000). He has also published a full-length comedy, Nevertheless . . . (Aran Press, 1989), five short dramas, and a wide range of poetry in journals and anthologies. His plays have been performed across the U.S., including five Off-Off-Broadway productions. Fragments of the Third Planet received its European premiere in 2000 in Pforzheim, Germany as part of their Millennium Festival. America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (Plain View Press, 2007) narrates American history from World War II to the present.

You can read more about him at his website.