Poet Joseph Donahue, with deep Lowell roots and who teaches at Duke University, has been actively publishing poetry as if he’s being chased by the hounds of Time across the national landscape. There’s a new notice full of praise in the Los Angeles Review of Books addressing his 2024 collection Terra Lucida XIII-XXI, poems that extend a sprawling multi-year composition.

Dan Beachy-Quick takes on this work, which is good to see as big-time attention. Widely distributed reviews of poetry are rare these days, so good on Joe for snagging this one.

B-Q writes: “What a gift it is to read a poet whose poems don’t privilege self-expression yet know the self is something expressed by the poem. Donahue is attuned, as few poets I know are, to the mysterious admixture of self and anonymity that are lyric poetry’s ongoing quest and question for us. Your life feels infinite while you’re inside it—but to be inside anything denies what the sense of infinity implies.”

The author has an even newer book titled Disfluency: Collected Uncollected Poems (1973-2023) with a moody cover photograph of the underside of a Lowell bridge by his longtime friend Tony Sampas, archivist at UMass Lowell. This book is also dedicated to Tony, quite a tribute. The long sequences within about the Kennedy drama in America and Kerouac’s spirit in Lowell will stand out for readers of this blog. The Kennedy section may be the best long poem by a writer of Donahue’s generation, which I don’t offer lightly. We’re both 70 years old, and he seems to be picking up steam. I’ll have more on Disfluency on this blog in a week or two when I’ve absorbed more of the 450 pages. A literary achievement of this order should be noted for the local records.

Joe Donahue’s writing requires that you roll up your mental sleeves.

Read the rest of the review here.