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.

Joshua Corey is reading Dark Church.

Joshua Corey is reading Joseph Donahue's Dark Church. Click here and scroll down. Corey writes, "Donahue pursues a simultaneous visionary poetics; Dark Church is the latest installment in his Terra Lucida sequence, a form of sacred writing, while Red Flash is a more worldly and profane collection of poems touched by wit, indignation, and gnostic fire."

You can order some gnostic fire of your own here: Dark Church.