Some of You Will Know by David Rivard
The wry, wise, funny, and reflective poems in David Rivard’s seventh book, Some of You Will Know, take a hard yet affectionate look at the games we play with ourselves. They are sure to mystify with all the things they know about the world: “To make room for air/ in his chest when he cries a crow/ has to hunch his wings/ and breathe deep”. Even more unsettling is how well they appear to know us: “You all,/ all of you/ say you don’t know/ what’s wrong/ with you, but/ of course you do,/ you have to.”
A delicate sense of being “within earshot” governs this book, allowing the poems to be both perishable and fundamentally timeless. Elemental claims emerge from moments that, however splendid, are merely human, as ordinary and repetitive and passing as the tides. The disarming tone of these claims does not keep their consequences from terrifying: “A fleeting bit of / memory is better forever than hope— / if you ask me.” They are, after all, the product not simply of a desire to write, but of a life lived, and actually seen and felt.
“Rivard’s poems move with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation. The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill.”
— Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post
“Some of You Will Know refreshes an old sense of the lyric in which the soliloquy dares to have something to do with anyone who might be within earshot. Somehow, the poems hang suspended in a beautiful, tenacious, woodsy silence. I can hear the time the poet has waited for revelations in between the revelations, the time the poet has waited with the silence for language to emerge. David Rivard is that rare thing - an American at home in such quiet. At the most lucid moments in these poems, I feel scared in a good way. Some of You Will Know is a daring, unique book. It’s as suspenseful as a crime drama. It’s the moment before the monks dismantle the mandala. It’s as miraculous as a tattoo on moving water. It’s as unbelievable and needed in this day and age as a letter from the future, which, of course, it is.”
— Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News