David Rivard


David Rivard is an American poet. He is the author of six books including Wise Poison, winner the 1996 James Laughlin Award, and Standoff, winner the 2017 PEN New England Award in Poetry. He is also a Professor of English Creative Writing in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of New Hampshire.
His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and TriQuarterly.

Awards

To the extent that poems are all, implicitly or explicitly, narrations of a lyric impulse, they are untoward. They are about something, to paraphrase Allen Grossman, the way a cat is about a house. Each poem in Wise Poison passes through so many shifts of narrative direction that no usual sense of destination survives; rather, directional moves are replaced by an accumulation of patterns of change. The very notion of passage is redirected by the mind into mind, the outgoing waves traced back to an in-house organ.