from "North of 60" Angels are aliens in spaceships. Angels descend and eagles soar. I am not an eagle. If I were an angel I would descend and give you of the bread of happiness the salt of anger & the message you already know better than I know: the moon & the lakes & the hills are forever. The much-anticipated Watermelon Kindness, David Donnell's first new collection in six years, comes from a part of the country that's somewhere between Archie Bunker and Dale Peck -- a contentious, but genial place. With more range than any other contemporary poet, Donnell ponders questions of art, history, and psychology while reveling in the sensory and all that makes us real. Whether exploring the modus operandi of other writers or paralleling the trajectory of a satellite with everyday occurrences like lost money, badly ended love affairs, or political disappointment, Watermelon Kindness is the Roman padda, a tough individual loaf approximately the size of your hand. Always concerned with what's most nourishing -- why we're as crazy as we are crazy -- it's forty percent crust, because crust is almost always the best of it.
"[Donnell is] a worldly Epicurean by temperament with a hearty appetite for food, love, the arts and bourgeois pleasures. There's social comment here, too, but more from the perspective of an editorialist than an activist." --"The Toronto Star"
"The best poems here are unquestionably great, and it's good to see this, possibly the largest of Donnell's poetry collections in some time . . . Donnell's poems are conversational koans, sometimes meaning nothing, meandering from meaning to meaning, topic to idea, bouncing off, sometimes." --"Prairie Fire Review of Books"
