Published by: Main Street Rag Publishing, P.O. Box 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001; (704) 573-2516. To order, click here. Or order from Amazon.com.
This wide-ranging collection of poems explores the inner and outer geographies of human life. Not only physical travel but also love and disease and politics and popular culture, whose contours we learn by necessity as we explore the terrains given to us.
About the Author:
David Radavich’s poetry is adventurous and wide-ranging. He is the author of Slain Species (Court Poetry, London), By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood, 1998), and Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2000). His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway productions, and in Europe. America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (Plain View, 2007) narrates U.S. history from World War II to the present from the perspective of everyday Americans, while Canonicals (Finishing Line, 2009) investigates “love’s hours.” Middle-East Mezze (Plain View, 2011) explores a troubled yet enchanting part of our world.
Radavich has published academic and informal essays on poetry and drama and has read his work in a variety of locations, including Canada, England, Egypt, Germany, Greece, and Iceland. Winner of numerous awards, he has served as president of The Thomas Wolfe Society and the Charlotte Writers Club and is poetry editor of Deus Loci.
Comment by Tony Abbott:
The Countries We Live In. What a wonderful title. Of course it means geographical places like America with its materialism, its politics, its inequalities. But it also means the human body, that country we inhabit for better or worse, that aging country. It also means the people we know and love, those whose countries we live in or who live in ours. I love both the theme and the range of this book, its multitude of countries all of which are crucial to our lives. “Every Day the World Starts Again” the opening poem tells us. The mystery, the complexity of life begins again, and that, David Radavich tells us, is our task―to live each day as fully as possible in those countries that are given to us to know, to inhabit, to celebrate.—Anthony S. Abbott, author of If Words Could Save Us
Comment by Fred Chappell:
“I don’t want to take your time / for what is not essential.” Lean, clean-lined, economical—yes. But the poems in The Countries We Live In are not minimalist. They do not evade their subjects; they are not wisps and hints. Here are piercing observations, wild surmises, pulsing thoughts, “adventure and test,” often with a sharp spice of humor. David Radavich has discovered the Country of Sudden Insight and has decided to live there. And thrive.—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Comment by Diana Pinckney:
David Radavich reveals The Countries We Live In with an all-seeing and wry eye and tender sensitivity. In this collection of lyrical journeys from such disparate places as war-torn 1975 Belfast to sun-kissed Corfu, Radavich savors the beauty of nature and the mysteries of human nature. From our wheat-gold Midwest to Pawleys Island, where the “moon pulled down its scythe,” poems examine the splendor and the heartache of our lives, how each day “lovers recover their skin.” The music that moves these poems is the lonely dance, the human condition his words so honestly portray. Loss and desire are ever near from sonnets to politics, from the love of guns to objects that “hide us from ourselves.” With Radavich, we travel the “heady wine of sea and history,” and when we close these pages, we are “heavy with departing” and ready to begin again.—Diana Pinckney, author of Alchemy