Joseph Donahue, Terra Lucida
ISBN: 978-1-58498-062-9, paper, $15.95
"Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue's ongoing magnum opus, is an astonishing work in which psychopompic dispatch and
apocalyptic portent, by turns audacious and distraught, mix worldly exactitude with vatic unrest. Striking in its range and compression, its culling of contemporary grist and archaic light, its reportorial tone’s melodic reach, it allies an unforced, unforeclosed spirituality with sifting intelligence of the severest kind. Long awaited, volume one is a beautiful, bracing, desert island book.” —Nathaniel Mackey
“Terra Lucida, lucid simplicity. Each word treated like a pearl, washed of all sea silt, to be set, not in a ring, but in the rungs of a gnostic ladder. The poems as consecutive salti mortali from rung to rung — one reads suspensefully: if the vision were to fail, a fall. But this visionary, anagogical work by a poet mad with light (en-light-ened), moving between our universe and an alternative one of potential perfection, throbs like a cosmos, each verse a breath. Relentlessly, the breaths move on — like wavelets, small only because they work in an immense, interminable ocean. A luminist purification of the art; Aphrodite reborn: American poetry rediviva.” —Nathaniel Tarn
"But with Terra Lucida, a book that revises and extends a cycle he’s been publishing since 1998, Donahue stakes a wager that poetry doesn’t have to play to our inner Jon Stewart. In place of superficial ironies and satires, he offers an abiding gravity that colors his work from vision to tone. This deep (but never dour) seriousness is most evident in the poems’ elevated pitch, which Donahue sustains whether he’s describing Adam in hell or a dinner party." --Bookforum
“These are poems of the corona, of a brilliance only visible when the source is darkened. The language of Terra Lucida seems to be turning into light itself, or turning the lights of the universe on and off, as if it's the last ten seconds of our life.” --Mary Margaret Sloan
Joseph Donahue’s most recent full length collection of poetry is Incidental Eclipse published by Talisman House in 2003. He has lived in New York City and in Seattle, where he was a member of the Subtext collective. He now lives in Durham, North Carolina.
"Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue's ongoing magnum opus, is an astonishing work in which psychopompic dispatch and
apocalyptic portent, by turns audacious and distraught, mix worldly exactitude with vatic unrest. Striking in its range and compression, its culling of contemporary grist and archaic light, its reportorial tone’s melodic reach, it allies an unforced, unforeclosed spirituality with sifting intelligence of the severest kind. Long awaited, volume one is a beautiful, bracing, desert island book.” —Nathaniel Mackey
“Terra Lucida, lucid simplicity. Each word treated like a pearl, washed of all sea silt, to be set, not in a ring, but in the rungs of a gnostic ladder. The poems as consecutive salti mortali from rung to rung — one reads suspensefully: if the vision were to fail, a fall. But this visionary, anagogical work by a poet mad with light (en-light-ened), moving between our universe and an alternative one of potential perfection, throbs like a cosmos, each verse a breath. Relentlessly, the breaths move on — like wavelets, small only because they work in an immense, interminable ocean. A luminist purification of the art; Aphrodite reborn: American poetry rediviva.” —Nathaniel Tarn
"But with Terra Lucida, a book that revises and extends a cycle he’s been publishing since 1998, Donahue stakes a wager that poetry doesn’t have to play to our inner Jon Stewart. In place of superficial ironies and satires, he offers an abiding gravity that colors his work from vision to tone. This deep (but never dour) seriousness is most evident in the poems’ elevated pitch, which Donahue sustains whether he’s describing Adam in hell or a dinner party." --Bookforum
“These are poems of the corona, of a brilliance only visible when the source is darkened. The language of Terra Lucida seems to be turning into light itself, or turning the lights of the universe on and off, as if it's the last ten seconds of our life.” --Mary Margaret Sloan
Joseph Donahue’s most recent full length collection of poetry is Incidental Eclipse published by Talisman House in 2003. He has lived in New York City and in Seattle, where he was a member of the Subtext collective. He now lives in Durham, North Carolina.