The Land that Secretes Light

Dan Beachy-Quick reviews Joseph Donahue’s “Terra Lucida XIII–XXI.”

By Dan Beachy-QuickJanuary 24, 2025

• Poetry

• Philosophy & Religion

THE EDITORS OF VERGE Books, Peter O’Leary and John Tipton, continue to lavish love on books wholly deserving of the care. Take Joseph Donahue’s two-volume Terra Lucida XIII–XXI (2024) as the most current example: Musica Callada and Near Star come housed in a box clad in a deep-loam brown cloth, the color of leaf-rot, fungal fecundity itself. Such care, if it’s truly meaningful, is so only because it adorns a poetry whose nature shares the same cosmic ethic. Joseph Donahue is a poet for whom, couplet by couplet, poetry is the principal way of tuning a life to the deeper orders of the world, where even death’s irreparable rift is a complement to life’s wild loveliness. For Donahue, the poem is the primary tool for understanding the weird work living is.

Each poem feels written with a handmade care that is reflected in the care manifest in the books Verge has made of them. There’s a holiness to the presentation, a kind of reliquary, as if the object-life of the books primes the reader’s attention for sacred spaces; and among all the things reading a poem might be, it fundamentally still is what it has always been—an initiation into the mysteries. Take the title of the second volume, which translates as “silent music,” as a form of that mystery. It’s a paradox that propels us to the fine edge where the known and the unknown, the speakable and the unspeakable, meet—the very edge on which any poem of necessity occurs, where contradiction and opposition are the bedrock elements of revelation.

The first section of Musica Callada, “Dickinson Devotions,” begins in an exalted attention to Dickinson’s orthography, the dark cursive line against a blank white page that is the very contradiction that makes a letter legible, cosmos and chaos, is and is-not, life and death. Donahue is a poet who reminds us that every poem is also, beyond or below the content of its utterance, a fundamental song that replays the primary work of worldly creation in the demiurge desire to make a poem on a page:

          Black diagonal waves
          cutting the sky of

          the page,
          in the rush of,

          the surge, the rip of,
          a censorious

          wind, raising up
          precise

          stipples of
          negation.

               *

Note here that the primacy of the poem is other than linguistic, attuned to marks that hearken back to our most ancient form of making, the child’s finding a rhythm to her scribble, a pencil’s looping, leaning, endless OOOs. Note, too, as Donahue’s poem progresses, that urge to mark so fundamental to human nature that it’s nearly anonymous grows more personal, tracing—as few poets I know can manage to do—poesis as foundational making to the intimate, selved, work of the lyric poem:

          Black slashes,
                       tilting right.

               *

           (And later     a judgment
          upon culled letters: x’s. loops, squiggles, horizontal

          strikes through the
          horizontal

          flow of
          feeling from

                 deep within
          a dead century.)

          A darkening love letter, a note
          that may not quite

          know what
          it is: a first cry,

          a hint already
          turning invocation, calling

          into
          being

          all that ever
          need be: an orchard,

          a rising sun, fields,
          trees, bees, robins, bobolinks.

The very gesture of a mark on a page, regardless if the mark makes linguistic sense, say an endless series of right-leaning loops (as of Cy Twombly’s wondrous white chalk circles against the dark slate), brings the possibility of a world “into / being.” But in Donahue’s mind, that thin black line properly seen is also one of infinite magnitude, and there’s also oblivion in the “rich black ink.” He attunes us to an irony that baffles the mind’s want for certainties—that the work of life is also the work of death, and the invocation that sings into being all we need to be (orchard and sun, trees and bees, and the bobolink, with a yellow sun-circle on the back of her head), also invokes the un-sun, and the un-orchard. The positive begets the negative, the negative the positive. Yes-no, says the cosmos entire, an impossible word. It reminds me of an anecdote about the Western world’s first philosopher, Thales. He told a follower that life and death were one. Then why not die? asked the student. Because they are one, the teacher answered.

Perhaps what I find so beautiful in these two collections—a beauty so immediate and glowing in my mind that I felt the quick, keen shame of not knowing the work before now—is that the largely philosophical is rooted down in the particulars of the life through which the poems emerge. It is a thinking more mycological than logical—the poem working in the infinitesimal inversion where life and death keep exchanging places. Pierced by dreams, punctuated by prayers, the axis of Near Star is the death of a childhood friend, a man nicknamed the “Master of Disaster.” As in the “Dickinson Devotions,” though cast here into most personal terms, Donahue understands—as if it were written into his poetic DNA—that lyric art confounds love with death and death with love, and encomium and eulogy, praise and mourning properly understood, occur simultaneously. Love inheres in the details:

          A man with a knack
          for solutions,

          a tinkerer,
          an improviser,

          who could figure out
          most things mechanical,

          electronic, automotive,
          anything involving

          pipes, wires, shingles, insulation,
          concrete, having worked in the trades

          and in restaurants,
          in the kitchen,

          a visionary behind a bar,
          a gifted artist

          and listener, a man
          with credentials

          in love and grief
          and joy.

               *

          The one all around
          wanted around

          when things
          went wrong. […]

               *

          Over the years, among
          some who loved him

          an honorific
          emerged:

          The Master of
          Disaster.

The poem moves from memory to funeral, from funeral to final rites of a different sort—his friend’s ashes put in small packets (his daughter noting: “I’d always / thought all ashes // are black, but I / guess not”), and the ashes tied to fireworks:

          Full night now, tide out,
          kelp-smell and wet

          pebble rattle
          in the rising

          moonlight,
          the fireworks

          fizzle, vault, and burst
          over the breakers

          in long
          glittering arcs.

“Thought all ashes.” It’s a line now I carry everywhere with me, and it feels like a touchstone to the vision of these necessary poems, a mantra of a kind. It reminds me that a thought, at least for a while, is as living a thing as I myself am—and as mortal. The dark ash of ink, the white ash of the page, both make the larger field of being fertile again. That there is a next life, a next poem, what other dream, what other prayer, could there be?

Musica Callada also revolves around a primary loss, the death of the poet’s father. The eponymous section opens with a plaintive, impossible prayer:

          After
          my dad

                   dropped
                          dead

          I missed
          him

                  so, so
          much

          all I wanted
          was to

          reach
          up

          into and
          through my

          womb,
          up into

          the
          ether

          grab a shred of
          what

          still was
          of

          him and
                  pull

                      that what
          back, back

          into
          life.

It feels as if Joseph Donahue finds within the juxtaposition of opposed states—light-dark, white-black, life-death, day-night—an infinitesimal interstice that properly seen, by which I mean poetically seen, opens an infinitude of a different sort. It is a mythic, innocent, childlike space, where the emptiness of death is matched by a fecund absence within (“my // womb”), and one can learn to reach through one into the other, utter innerness to absolute otherness, and bring into being what has been lost to the oldest chaos. It is a true wish, because incomplete, because uncertain: to “pull // that what / back, back // into / life.” What is that what? Whatever it is, it is not all—just a shred. I hear in that wish the child’s magic sense that the fragment is larger than the whole; I hear in it the ancient surety that some something persists eternally through the endless exchange of contradicting states, a little stitch that not only holds together life and death but also, in doing so, makes of them whole cloth.

A lesser poetry would make of that dear wish a final arrival, an epiphany, but Donahue understands that our cosmic realities never undo the heart-hurt days of our life in time. Much to his credit as a lyric practitioner, a genuinely philosophic poet (which Donahue undoubtedly is) never lets the philosophy overtake the life. The mind surrenders to the world. He gives us consolation that does not console, though it eases something—what, I don’t know—in the heart, or in the soul. It’s there in grammar itself, the simple shift in a letter that turns that past tense alive once again:

          Take from the end of a verb
          a d and put in an s, an s

          that sounds like a z. Voice
          the sibilant, and time itself

          changes. And if the verb is within
          a sentence, and the sentence

          tells a story too vast for
          a single sentence to tell,

          nonetheless, the whole story
          changes, because time itself,

          or at least the life of
          the subject of the sentence

          in regard to time is now
          forever altered, the past

          sliding into the present.

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. We rely upon our limits:

          the appearance of

          infinity (but
                      not yet

                            infinity
                                   itself).

The details hold the secrets they almost reveal:

          Of olives, of salt, of
                 a jolt of pepper.

               *

          Of the onion which, in
          this new instance, is the sun.

                       (Around which all ingredients,
                       all spices, move.

                       The onion is a sun kept
                                          hidden in the earth).

“The onion is a sun kept / hidden in the earth,” yes it is, yes it is, amen, amen. Maybe the truest prayers only bring us to the fact of the world. You live, you die—it’s hard, in the end, to tell the difference. The sun is buried in the earth, and you can dig it up, and eat it, and life goes on. Salt sparks the tongue, pepper makes you cry; the olive is a word of hidden rhyme, saying aleph (and yes, I hear it too) says “O live.” Says, “O life.” Verb versus noun. Just one of the many mysteries. And the poems, unlike most oracles, are a kind one, saying to every attentive listener, “Friend, I’m suffering it too.”