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.