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.”