Published by Texas Review Press
(Texas A&M University Press Consortium)
Paperback $8.95, Hardcover $14.95
PRAISE FOR DAVE PARSONS’ POETRY
I read Dave Parsons’ poetry with delight. He has high intelligence and a ready wit which make his poems unlike those of anyone who writes like him, at least in this language. It gives me joy to see this book.
- -Robert Phillips
I long for the old days of clarity," says David Parsons in one poem, and the elegiac tone--for parents, relations, friends, and places--is everywhere present in The Color of Mourning. Yet this is not to call his book downbeat; Parsons' Whitmanesque inclusiveness harbors for good or bad and brings with it many moments of undiluted joy. I can't think of having recently read an opening poem as gripping as "It's Not About Remembering," and the momentum it created kept me going to discover these unsettling closing lines: "now and again finding / that I have been living with great confidence / a life based on false premise. —R.S. Gwynn
For Editing Sky:
Whether he is writing about historic houses and stately anonymous trees, or flying back—flying forward!—to reconnect to his aged father, or playing handball, or reading Kierkegaard, Dave Parsons writes with a rugged and forthright honesty, with an open-hearted freshness, with the true voice of feeling. It behooves us to listen. —Edward Hirsch
Energy and exuberance—Texas virtues—mark these new poems by Dave Parsons. Editing Sky is exactly their challenge: to bring into narrative focus the immediacy of their celebrations and concerns; to bring down to scale the size of the ambition they place on the moment. At their best, Parsons' poems make a kind of country city music of the language of this longing. —Stanley Plumly
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DAVID M. PARSONS was the recipient of a National Endowment of the Humanities Dante Fellowship to the State University of New York, the French/American Legation Poetry Prize and T.C.U./descant’s 2006 Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award. His first collection of poems, Editing Sky, was winner of the 1999 Texas Review Poetry Prize and was 2000 Finalist for the Violet Crown Book Award. Parsons was designated Poet Laureate of Montgomery County Texas for 2005 - 2010. He is Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at North Harris Montgomery College and teaches creative writing workshops for Inprint, Inc. in Houston. www.daveparsonspoetry.com