Michael Donaghy
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Michael Donaghy
The title poem of this collection looks at the linguistic initiation rites of soldiers. “One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey,” it begins. Yet two verses later: “The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving. Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree. Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters. ‘Maxine, Laverne, Patty.’ ” The other entries are similarly inventive.
Michael Donaghy
This collection of poems by Michael Donaghy begins impressively. The first poem, “The Excuse”, is a comic-but-elegiac, sly-yet-touching riff on the pain of losing and remembering a father: “’My father’s sudden death has shocked us all’, Even me, and I’ve just made it up”. The second, equally sensitive poem “Not Knowing the Words”, also deals with a dead father, but this time gently and eloquently argues with itself as to how the father’s void can be filled. Then there’s the fourth poem, “Black Ice and Rain”. This is a true tour de force: a shocking,…
