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In poetry written over fifty years Disfluency, Collected Uncollected Poems 1973-2023, is a brightly shattered bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist told in excavated images and recovered turns of thought. Beginning with early years in an ethnic, religious enclave, Disfluency traces the desertion of the town for the city, renders a pained disavowal of a life defined by kinship and sacraments, for the promise of the city, in this case, Manhattan. In a poetry devoted images and dreams, Disfluency edges ever outward into the world of history and myth, of capturing the passing clarities of lives and loves.
A serial prosepoem written over decades, "Purple Ritual" begins with a revised version of a work that appeared in the author's first book, Before Creation. A meditation on the fate of Orestes as he wanders from temple to temple through the ancient world seeking relief from his guilt is placed in correspondence with a later rendition of the foibles of a national family, the Kennedys. The awakening of consciousness to the events of public life begins with the assassination of JFK, followed by that of RFK, by the crime of Chappaquiddick, and by the sad and tawdry fates of later generations, wherein we see perhaps with some dismay, family romance and collective fate, intertwined.
These poems written over many years, some lost a long time, some forgotten, some at variance with the inclination of whatever the book was that was being written, were once poems that didn't quite fit anywhere but have eerily come together, as if they had foreseen what the poet did not, a secret autobiography of a self that the author was not sure was any longer there, but appears now, bearing witness to all that had been forgotten.
About the author
Joseph Donahue's most recent volumes of poetry are Musica Callada and Near Star, (Verge Books, 2024) volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida. Other recent works are Wind Maps I-VII (Talisman 2018), The Disappearance of Fate, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and Infinite Criteria (Black Square Editions 2022). He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000 (Talisman, 2002). He teaches Creative Writing at Duke University.
