The Copper Scroll by Joseph Donahue

“Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida is a fiercely, finely wrought essay on death & transfiguration: a work composed of acutely angled silences, lines of memory out of alignment with time. The tension of a tonal irresolution pervades each cycle of this continuing song: is it only the trembling of the light before extinction, or the sign of something overbrimming, about to spill over even that ultimate limit? Donahue’s poetry of passage is convergent upon a vanishing point of impending revelation.” – Andrew Joron

An Excerpt

As in a box
lodged in light

in celestial radiance,
as in a room inside the sun

where souls lie idle,
cool and quiet,

awaiting their fate
as the black walls gleam,

while hearing, at last,
the cantilation of

the spheres: a
microphone

or two, at
most, outside,

amid whispers
of rebirth . . .

About the Author

Joseph Donahue has published three books of poetry, most recently Incidental Eclipse.(Talisman, 2003.) The Copper Scroll is a section of an ongoing poem, Terra Lucida. Three earlier sections have appeared as chapbooks. The most recent of these, In This Paradise, was published by Carolina Wren in 2004.