Norman Finkelstein on Terra Lucida XIII-XXI

Norman Finkelstein has written a capacious review of Joseph Donahue’s box set Terra Lucida XIII - XXI at Restless Messengers.

Writes Finkelstein: Let us step back from the heat of Donahue’s poems. What does it mean to observe “the hidden teachings,” so that as enlightened (as he would put it, “endarkened”) a reader as Robert Duncan can look into a poet’s work and see “a new / religion coming to be”? And what role does Donahue play? Is he a scribe? An exegete? Or is he himself an initiate, seeking that same transcendental union? Like a number of other poets about whom I’ve written here at Restless Messengers and elsewhere, such as Nathaniel Mackey, Peter O’Leary, Patrick Pritchett, and Elizabeth Gray, Donahue understands poetic identity as a fundamentally initiatic process. It involves deep reading, often of a single precursor, a guide who leads the poet into the mundus imaginalis. It is a search for gnosis.

Dan Beachy-Quick on Terra Lucida XIII-XXI

Dan Beachy-Quick reviews Joseph Donahue’s box set, Terra Lucida XIII-XXI, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Read the review here.

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.”

Kylan Rice on Verge.

Kylan Rice has written a major review essay on Alicia Cohen's Coherer and Joseph Donahue's Dark Church, along with discussions of the work of Verge co-captains John Tipton and Peter O'Leary. Of Cohen's work, Rice writes, she "affirms what we have already known," adding contemplatively, "Demotic augur, cledonomancer, Cohen elaborates on an Eteoclean approach, embracing reading as a kind of fateful being-called..." Whew!

Describing Donahue's Dark Church, Rice writes: "The end of days is that mist that distills over Joseph Donahue’s Dark Church. Be it a mist, it’s still the quality of mist to refract a glow of light. The newest installment of a series titled Terra Lucida, Dark Church unfurls its sweeping personal epic on a lyric scale, but framed at start and finish in impersonal, planetary terms. Donahue maps his lyric consciousness onto the planet, ranging widely over world and spacetime in compressed continuous couplets."

This essay appears in West Branch, a journal edited by the estimable G.C. Waldrep, out of Bucknell University.

You can purchase Coherer here.

You can purchase Dark Church here.

And don't forget the newest Verge title, Tirzah Goldenberg's Aleph.

Coherer!

Alicia Cohen's Coherer is here!

About Coherer, Jonathan Skinner says:

Alicia Cohen’s measures step delicately into a century littered with “cruel objects made brutal-footed,” countering with airy vowels—a patterned, searching transport of the actual. Her themes are of the cosmological everyday, mingled with philosophical studies as much as of the sweat and honey of house chores, threading by ear “majestic nothing,” “strong slippery real,” and “sweetfat relations.” She is obsessed with calculation yet sworn to the incalculable. Coherer consults a “barbarous atlas” of sorrows, seas swelling with plastic, poisoned households, the suffering of “animal people,” yet hums with incalculable pleasures—“wild dear” children, the togetherness of reinhabitation, a “world of body’s measure.” Sourced in ancient sounds, the poems offer homing signals, echolocations amidst the shifting atmospheres of a changed climate, not around but within “molecule order’s mute mutinous din.”

Order here.