Disfluency by Joseph Donahue

Disfluency by Joseph Donahue

$30.00

Collected uncollected poems (1973-2023)

In poetry written over fifty years Disfluency, Collected Uncollected Poems 1973-2023, is a brightly shattered bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist told in excavated images and recovered turns of thought. Beginning with early years in an ethnic, religious enclave, Disfluency traces the desertion of the town for the city, renders a pained disavowal of a life defined by kinship and sacraments, for the promise of the city, in this case, Manhattan. In a poetry devoted images and dreams, Disfluency edges ever outward into the world of history and myth, of capturing the passing clarities of lives and loves.

A serial prose-poem written over decades, “Purple Ritual” begins with a revised version of a work that appeared in the author’s first book, Before Creation. A meditation on the fate of Orestes as he wanders from temple to temple through the ancient world seeking relief from his guilt is placed in correspondence with a later rendition of the foibles of a national family, the Kennedys. The awakening of consciousness to the events of public life begins with the assassination of JFK, followed by that of RFK, by the crime of Chappaquiddick, and by the sad and tawdry fates of later generations, wherein we see perhaps with some dismay, family romance and collective fate, intertwined.

A central sequence of poems “Shadows in the Water”, explores aberrant mental states, manias, euphoria, Salt Lake City, jury duty, cult initiation, murder, fires out west, and a conversation with a woman named Rose. Another sequence, “Where Affection Holds No Steady Mansion” traces an all-absorbing love affair from its beginnings through its end and on into a lifetime of recurring dreams.

Central to the tale of exile and wandering told in fits and starts by the volume are ekphrastic works responding to painting, photography, and film.  A devotion to the figure of the femme fatale, she who unites dreams and waking life, this world and the beyond, is attested to in a poetic survey of the films of Nastassja Kinski.

These poems written over many years, some lost a long time, some forgotten, some at variance with the inclination of whatever the book was that was being written, were once poems that didn’t quite fit anywhere but have eerily come together, as if they had foreseen what the poet did not, a secret autobiography of a self that the author was not sure was any longer there, but appears now, bearing witness to all that had been forgotten.

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 482
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: November 2024
  • ISBN 978-1-962847-12-4

Praise

The grist of the quotidian lent grandeur, made epic; exquisite detonations of remembered grief; phantasms commingling the sacred and profane; declarations exposing the perversities of public events; and minor key ecstasies that halt the reader mid-stanza so they might wish that life could be more like the language purposed to describe it: such are the sometimes turbulent, always seductive delights that mark Joseph Donahue’s decades-long career. While a genesis of this poetic affluence—an imaginative domain in which, for instance, mere light takes on as dimensional a character as consciousness itself—might be discerned, make no mistake, even the early poems bear all the signs of a mature sensibility, and their music arrives with the casual ease of long experience. “Nothing but the untold,” Donahue promises. “The hidden voices. The warring & rhapsodic gods.”  —Albert Mobilio

Many of the unpublished poems by Joseph Donahue are relatively early work (although not all), finely configured “initiations / into abandonment” that lead from “dazzlement” to “dazzlement.” The sheer range and inventiveness of this voluminous collection is breath-taking, and I can only wonder why these poems are only now being brought together in a book. Finely hewn autobiographical prose fragments interchange with the lives and myths of others—the football star Kerouac of Lowell, Massachusetts where Donahue’s family resided; the Oresteia of the Kennedy years, the family’s years of exile in Dallas, Texas; and the poet’s years in Manhattan: “how much you / needed a vision of paradise, / even if it wasn’t yours.” —Jeanne Heuving

Excerpt

SIX SONGS FOR CHILDREN

Returning

The prodigal does not feel
all that penitent.
He thinks forgiveness
a trick with words.
A parapet and broken wall
molded from ice
fill the yard of his old house.
The children who live here now
are in for dinner.
His father does not hammer
the frozen latch and let him in
as he might have in life.
The evening wind would creak the gate,
but the gate is gone.
The snow fort rises
cold as a household,
but he feels no loss.
He follows God’s advice,
which is indistinguishable
from silence.

Author

Joseph Donahue

Photo by Star Black

Joseph Donahue’s most recent volumes of poetry are Musica Callada and Near Star, (Verge Books, 2024) volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida. Other recent works are Wind Maps I-VII (Talisman 2018), The Disappearance of Fate, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and Infinite Criteria (Black Square Editions 2022). He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000 (Talisman, 2002). He teaches Creative Writing at Duke University.

Additional information

Weight 28 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × 1.25 in

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