Michael Leong in the online cultural publication hyperallergic.com contributes what could be a game-changing review of recent books by poet Joseph Donahue (Lowell-connected and holder of an endowed professor’s chair at Duke University). Here’s the opening paragraph:

Among contemporary American poets, Joseph Donahue is an underrecognized master. For years, he has been accumulating a prodigious body of work in which a searching vision and a refinement of craftsmanship combine. If, for John Ashbery, Incidental Eclipse(2003) “confirms Donahue as one of the major American poets of this time,” recent publications, Red Flash on a Black Field (Black Square Editions, 2014) and Dark Church(Verge Editions, 2015), further solidify the splendor of Donahue’s accomplishments. BothRed Flash and Dark Church are hefty volumes — over 200 pages each — and both are beautifully produced and designed (the former by Shari DeGraw and the latter by Jeff Clark). Part of the impressiveness of this output is the apparent ease in which Donahue inhabits differing modes of poetic expression, which variously engage with the complexity of our material and spiritual lives.

Read the full essay-review here.

Poet Joseph Donahue

(web photo courtesy of Star Black)