SPARKS FROM THE ANVIL: The Smith College Interviews, by Christian McEwen, Bauhan Publishing, 2015, includes an interview with Patrick Donnelly: “In his interview, Patrick Donnelly suggests that in the deep core of everything we experience, ‘there is light, there is luminosity, there is tenderness.’ These words aptly describe as well the fundamental gifts to be found in Sparks from the Anvil.”
Look for Patrick Donnelly's essay "The Way of the Spring" in BODIES OF TRUTH: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine, University of Nebraska Press, 2019: "...I keep a framed quote on a shelf in the meditation room that Stephen and I have set up in our house. It’s from an essay by James Carse, and expresses perfectly what I’ve come to feel about living with HIV, or about any other danger that threatens to diminish my life: 'This is the deepest secret of the living water: it transforms every obstruction into a new expression of itself. It accepts as channel what is presented as barrier. The mountain does not stand in the way of the spring; it is the way of the spring.'"
THE PRACTICING POET: Writing Beyond the Basics, Terrapin Books, 2018, includes Donnelly’s essay “Sentimentality, Character, and the Health of Your Poem”: "...people are sometimes sentimental, and there’s absolutely no reason a writer can’t create a sentimental character, including the speaker, in a poem. But remember that the speaker or character
can be sentimental without the poem itself being so."
can be sentimental without the poem itself being so."
Donnelly’s poems are included inThe Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007:
HOW THE AGE OF IRON TURNED TO GOLD
My death makes her way to me
carrying green leaves.
I hear my prayer coming
behind illness, romantic noise,
urgent telephone messages,
alchemical lab results,
like a brook weaving
through thicket.
Water knows the way,
it isn't lost.
My teacher comes to me
by the western gates,
her eyes gone violet
as the peal of a bell
as she bends to gather
all her tender puppies by the neck.
HOW THE AGE OF IRON TURNED TO GOLD
My death makes her way to me
carrying green leaves.
I hear my prayer coming
behind illness, romantic noise,
urgent telephone messages,
alchemical lab results,
like a brook weaving
through thicket.
Water knows the way,
it isn't lost.
My teacher comes to me
by the western gates,
her eyes gone violet
as the peal of a bell
as she bends to gather
all her tender puppies by the neck.