Donald Wellman

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Roman
  Exercises

 ISBN: 978-1-58498-117-6, paper, $18.95
“In Roman Exercises Donald Wellman’s obvious models — Charles Olson and Ronald Johnson — play tug-of-war with Wellman’s spirit. His poems roil in, and toil under, the burden of the past. In this poignant, confessional, set of self-reflexive lyrics, bio- and aesthetic-diversity are matters of life and death. If Roman Exercises fails to exorcize our demons, it does trace the history of how we got here.” —Tyrone Williams
 
“Wellman has surfaced as the quiet cartographer of our new century’s catastrophic dawn. His poems are blossoms of encyclopedic annotation. They transcribe the prevailing brokenness. They are songs defiant of commodification’s false logic. Wellman situates beauty in bold acts of psychologic decryption. Roman Exercises is haunted by the efficacious communalism of bees, bees that concretize hope for a society of cooperation even as hives decay and landscapes become burdened by their absence.” —David Rich
 
“Some poets hear the sound of mountain streams, as Homer heard the sea. I know of one poet who hears the prairie winds.  Don Wellman hears the bees gathering the sweetness in the garden and the woods. It’s the sound one hears when one would say that it is quiet. The poems that modulate the buzz are deep and insistent.  ‘…suggest bees in an updraft. / Tap dance, archive.’”  —Don Byrd
 
Donald Wellman, poet, editor, and translator lives in Weare, New Hampshire. His books of poetry include The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres 2012), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), and Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009). He edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies, devoted to topics bearing on postmodern poetics, including volumes entitled Coherence, Perception and Translations: Experiments in Reading. His translation of Enclosed Garden by Emilio Prados is available from Lavender Ink / Diálogos. His translation of Antonio Gamoneda’s Gravestones is available from the University of New Orleans Press. His translation of Gamoneda’s Description of the Lie is available in a bilingual edition from Talisman House, Publishers.
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