David Rivard

David Rivard (born 1953 in Fall River, Massachusetts) is an American poet.

His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and TriQuarterly. David Rivard is Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review, and teaches at the University of New Hampshire, and the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing Program. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Awards

• Two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Foundation
• Fellowship the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
• Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America
• Pushcart Prize.
• O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize
• 1987 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
• 1996 James Laughlin Award for his second collection of poems Wise Poison
• 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship

Works

Books

• Sugartown, (Graywolf Press, 2006)
• Bewitched Playground, (Graywolf Press, 2000)
• Wise Poison, (Graywolf Press, 1996)
• Torque (1987), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the Pitt Poetry Series.

Reviews

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 (changes in tense, changes in figuration, changes in overlay of image, curves of memory in cloverleaf). The very notion of passage (temporal, spatial, literary) is redirected by the mind into mind, the outgoing waves traced back to an in-house organ.