Joseph Donahue: An Drochshaol

“Irish historians are of no credit in this matter” Sir Richard Cox once remarked, regarding the capacity of the Irish to tell of their past. “The very truths they write do not oblige our beliefs because they are so mixed with impossible stories and impertinent tales.” The opening sections of an in-progress volume of the ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue’s new chapbook An Drochshaol contains poems of impossible and impertinent origins. The title is Irish and refers to the Irish famine. The poems relay the reverberation of what has been called the Victorian Apocalypse, as felt over generations in America by those who descended from those who left no descendants, who starved in a would-be ancestral land, and whose non-existence is a generative presence, felt not infrequently in dreams. The full volume, to be called A Bad Time, will elaborate, as might any proper Irish historian, a past which cannot be known by those who feel of a place no one of them has ever been. A Bad Time will close with the blessed arrival on the Aran Islands in 1937 of the savior of the Irish race, Antonin Artaud.

Joseph Donahue’s most recent volumes of poetry are Música 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). Disfluency, Collected Uncollected Poems, (1973-2013) is forthcoming from Dos Madres Press. He teaches Creative Writing at Duke University.