Description: Little Acres is that book -- a chapbook really -- of 40 trim pages, like a small lyrical garden rooted in a sensibility that surrounds everything rural: landscape, trees, birds, animals, flowers, weather, all filtered through an intuitive sensibility, all contributing to the book's passion for both language and insight.
Brief description: David Feela, retired from a 27 year teaching career, works as a poet, freelance columnist, and thrift store book collector. He earned an MFA from Vermont College, with undergraduate degrees from St. Cloud State University. His writing has appeared in hundreds of regional and national publications, including syndication by the High Country News "Writers on the Range," and The Denver Post. Writing has appeared in Mountain Gazette, Small Farmer's Journal, Utne Reader, the Santa Fe Literary Review, to name a few. For 11 years Feela served as a contributing editor for the former Inside/Outside Southwest magazine. He currently writes monthly columns for the Four Corners Free Press and the Durango Telegraph. Feela has authored one poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press, 1998), winner of the Southwest Poet Series, a full length poetry edition, The Home Atlas (WordTech, 2009), and a collection of essays, How Delicate These Arches (Raven's Eye Press, 2012) which was chosen as a creative non-fiction finalist for the Colorado Book Award. A selection of his poetry is forthcoming in volume 2, The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado's Western Slope, through Conundrum Press. He resides in Cortez, Colorado.
Review Quotes:
In this fine collection, David Feela's poems lead the reader into a world that is both ordinary and extraordinary. As the poems meander through rural and natural landscapes, they show Feela's empathy for the small and the neglected, for what has been abandoned and what deserves to be celebrated. Feela has the talent to make empty fields and vacant farmhouses burst with new life. Other poems find beauty and shed light on daily experiences, illuminating human nature with its joys, its failures, and its in-between moments. Like ripples moving outward from the middle of a pond, the poems in Little Acres lead the reader to insights that reach far beyond the poems' everyday subjects.
--Bill Meissner, author of the poetry books American Compass and The Mapmaker's Dream and a novel, Spirits in the Grass
If you are looking for subject-matterless, incoherent, monomaniacal and Narcissistic poetry with little if any appeal to emotion, intellect or lasting aesthetic value other than authorial self-worship, you must put this book down immediately or risk a severe burning of your palms.
If you want to read a book filled with love, life, and razor wit based on incredible observation and perception, written in some of the sharpest, best-crafted lines you'll find out there anywhere on the vast horizon of poetry, brimming with the freshest imagery and figurative language you've seen in eons, this just might be your lucky day. It's been a long time since I said I totally loved the reading of a book of poetry: that dry spell has just ended.
-- David Lee, First Poet Laureate of Utah, author of over a dozen collections including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize nominated, News From Down to the Café, recently released, Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans, and a forthcoming collection, Mine Tailings.
In this new collection, David Feela gifts the reader with moments of days lived close to earth and to home in poems that quietly contemplate memories and observations, both shared and private. Crafted in simple language and metaphor, the poems recall winter snows, summer fields, an eagle in a tree, a pot of tea, and boxes in the attic. These are some of the images that evoke the poet's question: what is the past/ if not an accumulation of things we/ cannot touch wrapped up in the feeling/that we also cannot let them go? In Little Acres Feela keeps the best parts of his world for himself and us.
-- Beth Paulson