Dan Beachy-Quick reviews Joseph Donahue’s box set, Terra Lucida XIII-XXI, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Writes Beachy-Quick: “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. We love the bounds we pretend to abhor. The briny revelation of eating an olive that is an earthly, not a heavenly, decree.”