My new book, Here’s Plenty, is now available. Published by Červenà Barva Press, it can be ordered from Červenà Barva Press, Amazon.com, or other booksellers. Watch the beautiful trailer here.
About the Book:
At its heart, David Radavich’s Here’s Plenty evokes the American South—in all its messy, charming, baffling glory. As a microcosm of the fragile planet we inhabit, this region struggles with violence, poverty, racism, and outdated social convention. And yet the ever-renewing beauty of the fertile landscape, a deep-seated love of story-telling, and the warmth of everyday people bring us the possibility of re-assessment and redemption. Radavich’s poems embody the mesmerizing complexities of human life.
About the Author:
David Radavich is the author of two narrative collections, America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007) and America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019). Among his lyric volumes are Slain Species (London, 1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (1998), Greatest Hits (2000), and Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009). Middle-East Mezze (2011) focuses on a troubled yet enchanting part of our world, while The Countries We Live In (2014) explores inner and outer geographies. Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun (2022) features Radavich’s German poems with English translations.
Radavich’s plays, both serious and comic, have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. He has published scholarly and informal essays and presented in such far-flung locations as Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, and Iceland. He has served as president of the Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers’ Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society and currently administers the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series.
Commentaries:
The poems in David Radavich’s Here’s Plenty come in seamless variations of splendor. The whole shapes a music lyrical and beautiful as the morning rain.
—Shelby Stephenson, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
The title of David Radavich’s remarkable collection is apposite. Here’s Plenty characterizes a broad panoply of states of mind and feeling that are in process of change, leaving alterations that may be new problems. Chaos is held in check only by means of will power, a duty to one’s own humanity. “Prometheus on the Crag” shows Everyman as a figure whose duty is to suffer. Many poets are strong, but few are tough in this necessary way. “Be generous / in your hatred: // You never know / what you’ll become.”
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Sometimes when we pick up a book of poems, we want it to feel like we are calling an old friend on the phone who understands and accepts us; Here’s Plenty is that kind of book. From the opening lines of the first poem “Sun Blanched,” which turns out to be a poem about the acceptance of loss, Radavich announces: “This is the fertile / garden I never knew.” Here is a poet at peace with himself and the life he has made in this garden. There’s an honesty about family, aging, history and place that is comforting. Rooted in the South, “A place where old water / draws back / and memory / and pain are blended,” Radavich’s poems pave “the way / into the bright darkness.”
—Marjory Wentworth, former Poet Laureate of South Carolina