Reviews of LITTLE-KNOWN OPERAS (Four Way Books, 2019)
I’ve been a big fan of these poems ever since I first heard them, and it was a delight to revisit them this month. These are carefully crafted poems that maintain a colloquial and playfully sarcastic voice, yet somehow are able to retain the ardor of a heart that seeks for the sacred in the little beauties of love, sex, art, and the elegance of well-lived moments. The center-piece of the book is a series of irreverent “Jesus Says” poems that morph into and interact with a series of poems about Maria Callas. There is a richness in the way the Callas poems merge the search for the sacred in beauty, the admiration of the ego and strength of a diva reacting to a callous world, along with nostalgia for the soft refuge of the feminine and the mother. There is a series of innovative poems that use times in YouTube recordings to capture and combine the past, present, and future of moments fixed in time and still living in their inspiration. This book also contains the most interesting Acknowledgments section you will find in a book of poetry! Donnelly combines the unsentimental confrontation with the pains and absurdities of living a gay life in the 21st century with a search for whatever divinity goes beyond and sustains this life better than any poet now writing.
—David Banach, 2023 Sealey Challenge
"Donnelly’s metaphysical epiphanies leave their own unique trail of poetic warmth and wakefulness. Indeed, all islands are connected under the water. Donnelly’s “Little-Known Operas” is an all-around lovely book."
—Scott Rex Hightower, Five Points
“...Rare poets such as Anne Carson, David Ferry, Jane Hirshfield, and Donnelly braid contrasting narratives and materials into revelation blooms of sublime tone…”
—Richard Jarrette, VOICE magazine [p. 9], Santa Barbara
Reviews of The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series 2013, recipient of the Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature)
Margaret H. Childs wrote for Kyoto Journal (Issue 95, 2020) that "Stephen Miller shows in exquisite detail how the anthologizing of Buddhist poems paralleled the development in Japanese poetry of the idea that the composition of poetry can be a Buddhist practice. ... The breadth and depth of this work and the brilliance of the translations constitute a significant contribution to the field of Japanese literature."
The Fall 2019 issue of Metamorphoses, the Five College Translation Journal, features Matthew Fraleigh's review of The Wind from Vulture Peak, featuring translations by Patrick Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller: "...the translations are consistently superb..."
“…Donnelly and Miller have done a brilliant job. … There is no doubt that The Wind from Vulture Peak is an important contribution to the study of Japanese waka and Buddhism, and, as a work of literary translation, it sets a good example for translators about how to work around classical literary forms to shed light on the uniqueness of each poem. As Miller writes in the Afterword, Donnelly has said that "he heard real people speaking in these poems." These are the voices of Buddhist believers following the path to enlightenment—sometimes they waver or are confused, other times they show strong determination. Through their scrupulous creative endeavors, Miller and Donnelly have managed to let these voices speak in a different tongue.”
—Michael Tsang, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“…powerful and moving translations as well as the in-depth analysis and historical context necessary to understand and truly appreciate the poetic form. … The discussion that follows each poetic section in The Wind from Vulture Peak allows readers to reexamine the translations and appreciate the subtleties that would have been evident to Japanese readers a millennium ago.”
—Michael Luke Benedetto, Poetry International
“Stephen Miller’s book lets us finally understand how the path of the Buddha and the path of poetry merged in the Japanese tradition. Each imperial anthology is cogently contextualized historically and the relations between poets, patrons, and politicians illuminated. The close readings of the poems, both individually and as parts of sequences, will be of enormous benefit to both students and scholars. We are indebted to the author and his co-translator for making such a significant body of Japanese poetry available to English-language audiences.”
—Joshua Mostow, Japanese Language and Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1, April 2016
“The Wind from Vulture Peak is an extraordinary book for anyone attracted to the life of art, poetry, meditation and contemplation. It explores the ways in which a traditional Japanese poetic form, the waka, became an integral part of the Buddhist spiritual path. Thus it became for many in Heian Japan that "the path of poetry is none other than the path of Buddha." Stephen Miller's exposition is subtle, clear and deeply sensitive; the poems with which he collaborated with Patrick Donnelly are like hearing directly into the heart. Here's Kōgen's poem on the Buddha's death:”
today’s tears
are the tears
of “if we had met”
in that long-gone garden
of goodbye
—D.J. Penick, on Amazon.com
“Been slowly devouring The Wind from Vulture Peak. A great accomplishment. Wonderful scholarship and a load of classical Japanese poetry beautifully translated.”
—Sam Hamill, via Facebook
Reviews of JESUS SAID (Orison Books, 2017)
“In lyrics wry and soulful, Donnelly suggests the gay boy can count himself in. Donnelly’s sound and approach I’d thought might never come back again. What excites me about these poems is how alive Jesus is, how personal and real: Jesus is available as he once was for George Herbert. Poets of the last generation, from O’Hara to Bishop, seemed to do away with Jesus. Donnelly writes: ‘I told Jesus, for thirty years I asked you to send me someone to love, and then Stephen came and we married, but we were old, so I begged you, keep us alive, let us live a little longer.’ I am grateful for such a sweet clean original gospel.”
—Spencer Reece
"One of my favorite books of the year. Simultaneously reverent and irreverent, if that is possible. Light hearted, but deadly serious in its treatment of aging, love, and the many forms in which the Divine presents itself to us. Evokes and evinces a gratefulness for life and beauty that is at the heart of all good poetry."
--David, on Goodreads
Reviews of NOCTURNES OF THE BROTHEL OF RUIN (Four Way Books, 2012)
“Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin is a brave collection of poems that holds nothing back, but accompanies us all to face the music of impermanence and love that sometimes comes our way. We all have the best intentions, but what comes out in our lives is often the embodiment of folly, at times humor, and certainly dumb luck, which in their own humor and grace, is sometimes the best teacher.”
--Colin Harrington, The Berkshire Eagle, 4/28/2018
“...By chance, I’m reading another book in which the poet’s personal lyrics are interspersed with translations. Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin by Patrick Donnelly includes Japanese poems translated by Stephen D. Miller. Many of Patrick’s poems portray gay life during the eighties, recalling his experiences as a way as to understand how love can be both tender and lustful, transient and haunting. The Japanese translations, though spare in number, place Patrick’s poems within the centuries old Japanese tradition of ‘mono no aware’ —writing poems or otherwise conveying the awareness of impermanence.”
—Emily Warn, from Poetry Magazine July/August 2013 Reading List
“These poems have something in them of Proust … a similar sprawl and hungry elegance. … A reader will step back from this collection and behold a precise constellation that at once feels timeless and yet just built.”
—Jory Mickelson in Lambda Literary Review
“Patrick Donnelly’s second book has a very big title: Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin. As the title promises, the book is a compendium of night songs from the place where bodies seek love and lives encounter philosophical undoing. … There is nakedness, hunting, and delight. There are meditations on the melancholy of earthly love woven with the raptures of celestial love. … Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin is a thoughtful book for mature readers. Patrick Donnelly is well on his way, clearly he has more to tell.”
—Scott Hightower, Fogged Clarity
“…an audible world where the cracking of a book spine sounds more loudly than a deluge of tongues. Even the silence is deafening, as when he implores to a past self—now blown to the winds of passage yet still trembling cobweb-like in the vestry of his thoughts—to twist the lipstick barrel of his desire, for it will someday drop his bucket down the well that shrouds his angelic charge with private joy.”
—Tyran Grillo, Between Sound and Space
“In the poem, ‘The Lungs, the Liver, and the Blood,’ there is a man with a rake, ‘who stood / in sweat and mizzle to open / one place where / the river needed to flow’, and that is an apt analogy for the poet, the quiet, tender, fierce observer—which Donnelly showed himself to be in his earlier book The Charge—and these poems are like small clearings in what has been blocked, spiritually, sexually, metaphysically.”
—Laura McCullough, MEAD
“If ‘every gesture triggers/ a cascade of ghost-futures,’ then every gesture here also triggers ghost-pasts, told in language both tough and lovely and with an unsentimental regard for mortality and ‘this cup/ of tears and fire and gall.’ Donnelly’s second book (after The Charge) is also cut through with some elegant translations of Japanese poems (done with Stephen D. Miller).”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Reviews
“These poems move steadily and unexpectedly with an originality that comes from a direct, truthful and reflective way of moving through the world, of being in love, of loving uncertainly, of asking the most interesting questions and listening for answers on the verge of audibility. Thank you.”
—D.J. Penick, on Amazon.com
“This is a book as rare for the tuning fork accuracies of its language and encyclopaedic breadth of its knowledge as for the fearlessness of its feeling. Patrick Donnelly’s urgent and brilliant poems embrace the omnivorous bonfires of transience and desire; by that permeable vow, they enter the surety of the lasting.”
—Jane Hirshfield
“Because they demand a going-beyond, good second books are harder to write than good first books. Patrick Donnelly’s second book, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, goes way, way beyond his first, The Charge, which was itself extraordinary for its clear-spoken and passionate espousal of life’s risks and rewards in the age of AIDS. This new book is not a continuation or enlargement of the earlier poems, though neither does it forsake their visions. Rather, it is an ambitious, winged re-imagining of the possibilities of voice, of what it means to be a particular human being speaking of consciousness and death in a particular time and place. Yet intercut with the poems are translations (done with Stephen D. Miller) from the Japanese, which have the strange and powerful effect of making Donnelly’s distinctively American poems feel timeless. I kept having the spooky sensation that this was a book that had been unearthed from some ancient civilization uncannily akin to our own. I know of no other second book that takes such a large and adventurous leap—linguistically, emotionally, imaginatively—head-on into what always has been and always will be the most important subject: how we should live in face of our consciousness of death.”
—Chase Twichell
Reviews of THE CHARGE (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press)
“The first book by a poet who writes with steely passion about love and grief in the age of AIDS. The poems are simultaneously tender, outraged, sexy, darkly funny, and full of a sadness learned at close range. Donnelly handles difficult subjects with an openness of heart and clarity of intellect that allow him to transform what might have been sources of bitterness and fear into profound spiritual exploration.”
--Amazon.com
“In this ambitious first collection of poems, Patrick Donnelly asks questions for which there are no answers. He poses them precisely because there are no adequate responses, because rhetorical questions need to be asked and acknowledged, what we do know as important as what we don't... A man leaves his dead lover's dead computer on the sidewalk one year after his death in 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua:' 'I don't care / I lived this way, the windows open wide, / in summer the doors, anyone passing could see / and take what they wanted, and they did," suggesting that time allows us to discard things, but more importantly, allows us to choose to do so. In this is also Donnelly's ars poetica. Here he announces how refreshingly 'wide open' he has made himself in these poems, how open to criticism and agreement and defamation, and from this openness he instructs us to take what we want, as from a lover now dead, to choose among sentiment over deaths from AIDS, from prayers, from anger, to take what we need to live our lives a little better and more easily, whatever that might be."
—Anna Ziegler, Saint Ann’s Review
“When the political forces and literary establishment attempts to divide us, segregating us into different aisles of the bookstore, making sure we don’t talk to one another, it is grand to find a writer who can speak about the riddles of life that transcend political and social boundaries... [Donnelly] will not let us segregate or disengage ourselves. He asks in these elegiac poems to life that we begin to experience life as a gift. His book will bring joy back to our eyes. Take his arm and enjoy what he shows you. Listen to him because we can no longer do otherwise.”
--Animus
"Patrick Donnelly's book gives us an author who is wry, impulsive, rakish, and personable, offering us snippets of city life that overflow with longing, vitality and pain... Donnelly's greatest strength may be his control of the pitch and inflection of his poems. We see it not just in the let's-go-to-bed poems, but also in the poems of suffering and loss... The poet is not just some rueful roué, but something more complicated and human. Caught between God and God's creation, he is the anchorite who never completely turns his back on this world, the angelic sybarite who never quite quits his conversation with God."
—Lee Rossi, 88: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry
"Such a complete and nuanced rendering of the many emotional connections we can have to a place, and how they become inseparable from each other, is a rare achievement... he has shown us a flawed and unjust world, but not before revealing the blessings that we can know in spite of those flaws, if not because of them. The charge he has accepted and now presses upon us demands that we learn how to face death and loss without letting them make us look for the easy, pure, and seemingly unalloyed truths that never fully honor the many manifestations of our love."
—Thomas March, Lambda Book Report
“Much of Patrick Donnelly’s work in THE CHARGE recalls the grief attributed to King David in the Psalms, particularly the desperate, human plea of Psalm 69: “Save me, O God!/For the waters have come up/to my neck,/...My eyes grow dim/with waiting for my God.” As an imitation of the short psalm-like cry, “Prayer after Refusing to Pray” is reminiscent of its biblical forbears in the formality and musicality of its couplets, and in the rhetoric of its questions. Donnelly recognizes the futility of moving against the captain of the vessel, and cries out, continuing in his human way to attempt to change fate.”
—Valerie Duff-Strautmann, Salamander
“Patrick Donnelly’s book is about sexuality, but it is not about sexual difference, not really, and this is what makes it shine so. Donnelly succeeds in transforming autobiography into archetype, in large part because he paints a much broader canvas. Here is New York City over a span of decades. Here are the speaker’s lovers as healthy men. Here they are as the doomed or the dead. Reading THE CHARGE I feel as if Donnelly has lived and continues to sink his teeth deep into what stings and nourishes all of us. His poetry is alive...[A]fter reading a poem like Donnelly’s “Prayer at the Opera” [I say] ‘Yes, yes, this is it exactly.’”
—Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe, Iron Horse Literary Review
“Especially strong is ‘Prayer over Dust,’ which—though drawing on contemporary details—evokes any human being who has grasped the ephemerality of life’s pleasures...in the face of death. The graphic imagery and philosophical suggestiveness is almost Elizabethan as the poet describes his body losing ‘interest/in the distinction between/Me and Not Me’...”
—John Taylor, The Antioch Review
I’ve been a big fan of these poems ever since I first heard them, and it was a delight to revisit them this month. These are carefully crafted poems that maintain a colloquial and playfully sarcastic voice, yet somehow are able to retain the ardor of a heart that seeks for the sacred in the little beauties of love, sex, art, and the elegance of well-lived moments. The center-piece of the book is a series of irreverent “Jesus Says” poems that morph into and interact with a series of poems about Maria Callas. There is a richness in the way the Callas poems merge the search for the sacred in beauty, the admiration of the ego and strength of a diva reacting to a callous world, along with nostalgia for the soft refuge of the feminine and the mother. There is a series of innovative poems that use times in YouTube recordings to capture and combine the past, present, and future of moments fixed in time and still living in their inspiration. This book also contains the most interesting Acknowledgments section you will find in a book of poetry! Donnelly combines the unsentimental confrontation with the pains and absurdities of living a gay life in the 21st century with a search for whatever divinity goes beyond and sustains this life better than any poet now writing.
—David Banach, 2023 Sealey Challenge
"Donnelly’s metaphysical epiphanies leave their own unique trail of poetic warmth and wakefulness. Indeed, all islands are connected under the water. Donnelly’s “Little-Known Operas” is an all-around lovely book."
—Scott Rex Hightower, Five Points
“...Rare poets such as Anne Carson, David Ferry, Jane Hirshfield, and Donnelly braid contrasting narratives and materials into revelation blooms of sublime tone…”
—Richard Jarrette, VOICE magazine [p. 9], Santa Barbara
Reviews of The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series 2013, recipient of the Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature)
Margaret H. Childs wrote for Kyoto Journal (Issue 95, 2020) that "Stephen Miller shows in exquisite detail how the anthologizing of Buddhist poems paralleled the development in Japanese poetry of the idea that the composition of poetry can be a Buddhist practice. ... The breadth and depth of this work and the brilliance of the translations constitute a significant contribution to the field of Japanese literature."
The Fall 2019 issue of Metamorphoses, the Five College Translation Journal, features Matthew Fraleigh's review of The Wind from Vulture Peak, featuring translations by Patrick Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller: "...the translations are consistently superb..."
“…Donnelly and Miller have done a brilliant job. … There is no doubt that The Wind from Vulture Peak is an important contribution to the study of Japanese waka and Buddhism, and, as a work of literary translation, it sets a good example for translators about how to work around classical literary forms to shed light on the uniqueness of each poem. As Miller writes in the Afterword, Donnelly has said that "he heard real people speaking in these poems." These are the voices of Buddhist believers following the path to enlightenment—sometimes they waver or are confused, other times they show strong determination. Through their scrupulous creative endeavors, Miller and Donnelly have managed to let these voices speak in a different tongue.”
—Michael Tsang, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“…powerful and moving translations as well as the in-depth analysis and historical context necessary to understand and truly appreciate the poetic form. … The discussion that follows each poetic section in The Wind from Vulture Peak allows readers to reexamine the translations and appreciate the subtleties that would have been evident to Japanese readers a millennium ago.”
—Michael Luke Benedetto, Poetry International
“Stephen Miller’s book lets us finally understand how the path of the Buddha and the path of poetry merged in the Japanese tradition. Each imperial anthology is cogently contextualized historically and the relations between poets, patrons, and politicians illuminated. The close readings of the poems, both individually and as parts of sequences, will be of enormous benefit to both students and scholars. We are indebted to the author and his co-translator for making such a significant body of Japanese poetry available to English-language audiences.”
—Joshua Mostow, Japanese Language and Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1, April 2016
“The Wind from Vulture Peak is an extraordinary book for anyone attracted to the life of art, poetry, meditation and contemplation. It explores the ways in which a traditional Japanese poetic form, the waka, became an integral part of the Buddhist spiritual path. Thus it became for many in Heian Japan that "the path of poetry is none other than the path of Buddha." Stephen Miller's exposition is subtle, clear and deeply sensitive; the poems with which he collaborated with Patrick Donnelly are like hearing directly into the heart. Here's Kōgen's poem on the Buddha's death:”
today’s tears
are the tears
of “if we had met”
in that long-gone garden
of goodbye
—D.J. Penick, on Amazon.com
“Been slowly devouring The Wind from Vulture Peak. A great accomplishment. Wonderful scholarship and a load of classical Japanese poetry beautifully translated.”
—Sam Hamill, via Facebook
Reviews of JESUS SAID (Orison Books, 2017)
“In lyrics wry and soulful, Donnelly suggests the gay boy can count himself in. Donnelly’s sound and approach I’d thought might never come back again. What excites me about these poems is how alive Jesus is, how personal and real: Jesus is available as he once was for George Herbert. Poets of the last generation, from O’Hara to Bishop, seemed to do away with Jesus. Donnelly writes: ‘I told Jesus, for thirty years I asked you to send me someone to love, and then Stephen came and we married, but we were old, so I begged you, keep us alive, let us live a little longer.’ I am grateful for such a sweet clean original gospel.”
—Spencer Reece
"One of my favorite books of the year. Simultaneously reverent and irreverent, if that is possible. Light hearted, but deadly serious in its treatment of aging, love, and the many forms in which the Divine presents itself to us. Evokes and evinces a gratefulness for life and beauty that is at the heart of all good poetry."
--David, on Goodreads
Reviews of NOCTURNES OF THE BROTHEL OF RUIN (Four Way Books, 2012)
“Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin is a brave collection of poems that holds nothing back, but accompanies us all to face the music of impermanence and love that sometimes comes our way. We all have the best intentions, but what comes out in our lives is often the embodiment of folly, at times humor, and certainly dumb luck, which in their own humor and grace, is sometimes the best teacher.”
--Colin Harrington, The Berkshire Eagle, 4/28/2018
“...By chance, I’m reading another book in which the poet’s personal lyrics are interspersed with translations. Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin by Patrick Donnelly includes Japanese poems translated by Stephen D. Miller. Many of Patrick’s poems portray gay life during the eighties, recalling his experiences as a way as to understand how love can be both tender and lustful, transient and haunting. The Japanese translations, though spare in number, place Patrick’s poems within the centuries old Japanese tradition of ‘mono no aware’ —writing poems or otherwise conveying the awareness of impermanence.”
—Emily Warn, from Poetry Magazine July/August 2013 Reading List
“These poems have something in them of Proust … a similar sprawl and hungry elegance. … A reader will step back from this collection and behold a precise constellation that at once feels timeless and yet just built.”
—Jory Mickelson in Lambda Literary Review
“Patrick Donnelly’s second book has a very big title: Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin. As the title promises, the book is a compendium of night songs from the place where bodies seek love and lives encounter philosophical undoing. … There is nakedness, hunting, and delight. There are meditations on the melancholy of earthly love woven with the raptures of celestial love. … Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin is a thoughtful book for mature readers. Patrick Donnelly is well on his way, clearly he has more to tell.”
—Scott Hightower, Fogged Clarity
“…an audible world where the cracking of a book spine sounds more loudly than a deluge of tongues. Even the silence is deafening, as when he implores to a past self—now blown to the winds of passage yet still trembling cobweb-like in the vestry of his thoughts—to twist the lipstick barrel of his desire, for it will someday drop his bucket down the well that shrouds his angelic charge with private joy.”
—Tyran Grillo, Between Sound and Space
“In the poem, ‘The Lungs, the Liver, and the Blood,’ there is a man with a rake, ‘who stood / in sweat and mizzle to open / one place where / the river needed to flow’, and that is an apt analogy for the poet, the quiet, tender, fierce observer—which Donnelly showed himself to be in his earlier book The Charge—and these poems are like small clearings in what has been blocked, spiritually, sexually, metaphysically.”
—Laura McCullough, MEAD
“If ‘every gesture triggers/ a cascade of ghost-futures,’ then every gesture here also triggers ghost-pasts, told in language both tough and lovely and with an unsentimental regard for mortality and ‘this cup/ of tears and fire and gall.’ Donnelly’s second book (after The Charge) is also cut through with some elegant translations of Japanese poems (done with Stephen D. Miller).”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Reviews
“These poems move steadily and unexpectedly with an originality that comes from a direct, truthful and reflective way of moving through the world, of being in love, of loving uncertainly, of asking the most interesting questions and listening for answers on the verge of audibility. Thank you.”
—D.J. Penick, on Amazon.com
“This is a book as rare for the tuning fork accuracies of its language and encyclopaedic breadth of its knowledge as for the fearlessness of its feeling. Patrick Donnelly’s urgent and brilliant poems embrace the omnivorous bonfires of transience and desire; by that permeable vow, they enter the surety of the lasting.”
—Jane Hirshfield
“Because they demand a going-beyond, good second books are harder to write than good first books. Patrick Donnelly’s second book, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, goes way, way beyond his first, The Charge, which was itself extraordinary for its clear-spoken and passionate espousal of life’s risks and rewards in the age of AIDS. This new book is not a continuation or enlargement of the earlier poems, though neither does it forsake their visions. Rather, it is an ambitious, winged re-imagining of the possibilities of voice, of what it means to be a particular human being speaking of consciousness and death in a particular time and place. Yet intercut with the poems are translations (done with Stephen D. Miller) from the Japanese, which have the strange and powerful effect of making Donnelly’s distinctively American poems feel timeless. I kept having the spooky sensation that this was a book that had been unearthed from some ancient civilization uncannily akin to our own. I know of no other second book that takes such a large and adventurous leap—linguistically, emotionally, imaginatively—head-on into what always has been and always will be the most important subject: how we should live in face of our consciousness of death.”
—Chase Twichell
Reviews of THE CHARGE (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press)
“The first book by a poet who writes with steely passion about love and grief in the age of AIDS. The poems are simultaneously tender, outraged, sexy, darkly funny, and full of a sadness learned at close range. Donnelly handles difficult subjects with an openness of heart and clarity of intellect that allow him to transform what might have been sources of bitterness and fear into profound spiritual exploration.”
--Amazon.com
“In this ambitious first collection of poems, Patrick Donnelly asks questions for which there are no answers. He poses them precisely because there are no adequate responses, because rhetorical questions need to be asked and acknowledged, what we do know as important as what we don't... A man leaves his dead lover's dead computer on the sidewalk one year after his death in 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua:' 'I don't care / I lived this way, the windows open wide, / in summer the doors, anyone passing could see / and take what they wanted, and they did," suggesting that time allows us to discard things, but more importantly, allows us to choose to do so. In this is also Donnelly's ars poetica. Here he announces how refreshingly 'wide open' he has made himself in these poems, how open to criticism and agreement and defamation, and from this openness he instructs us to take what we want, as from a lover now dead, to choose among sentiment over deaths from AIDS, from prayers, from anger, to take what we need to live our lives a little better and more easily, whatever that might be."
—Anna Ziegler, Saint Ann’s Review
“When the political forces and literary establishment attempts to divide us, segregating us into different aisles of the bookstore, making sure we don’t talk to one another, it is grand to find a writer who can speak about the riddles of life that transcend political and social boundaries... [Donnelly] will not let us segregate or disengage ourselves. He asks in these elegiac poems to life that we begin to experience life as a gift. His book will bring joy back to our eyes. Take his arm and enjoy what he shows you. Listen to him because we can no longer do otherwise.”
--Animus
"Patrick Donnelly's book gives us an author who is wry, impulsive, rakish, and personable, offering us snippets of city life that overflow with longing, vitality and pain... Donnelly's greatest strength may be his control of the pitch and inflection of his poems. We see it not just in the let's-go-to-bed poems, but also in the poems of suffering and loss... The poet is not just some rueful roué, but something more complicated and human. Caught between God and God's creation, he is the anchorite who never completely turns his back on this world, the angelic sybarite who never quite quits his conversation with God."
—Lee Rossi, 88: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry
"Such a complete and nuanced rendering of the many emotional connections we can have to a place, and how they become inseparable from each other, is a rare achievement... he has shown us a flawed and unjust world, but not before revealing the blessings that we can know in spite of those flaws, if not because of them. The charge he has accepted and now presses upon us demands that we learn how to face death and loss without letting them make us look for the easy, pure, and seemingly unalloyed truths that never fully honor the many manifestations of our love."
—Thomas March, Lambda Book Report
“Much of Patrick Donnelly’s work in THE CHARGE recalls the grief attributed to King David in the Psalms, particularly the desperate, human plea of Psalm 69: “Save me, O God!/For the waters have come up/to my neck,/...My eyes grow dim/with waiting for my God.” As an imitation of the short psalm-like cry, “Prayer after Refusing to Pray” is reminiscent of its biblical forbears in the formality and musicality of its couplets, and in the rhetoric of its questions. Donnelly recognizes the futility of moving against the captain of the vessel, and cries out, continuing in his human way to attempt to change fate.”
—Valerie Duff-Strautmann, Salamander
“Patrick Donnelly’s book is about sexuality, but it is not about sexual difference, not really, and this is what makes it shine so. Donnelly succeeds in transforming autobiography into archetype, in large part because he paints a much broader canvas. Here is New York City over a span of decades. Here are the speaker’s lovers as healthy men. Here they are as the doomed or the dead. Reading THE CHARGE I feel as if Donnelly has lived and continues to sink his teeth deep into what stings and nourishes all of us. His poetry is alive...[A]fter reading a poem like Donnelly’s “Prayer at the Opera” [I say] ‘Yes, yes, this is it exactly.’”
—Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe, Iron Horse Literary Review
“Especially strong is ‘Prayer over Dust,’ which—though drawing on contemporary details—evokes any human being who has grasped the ephemerality of life’s pleasures...in the face of death. The graphic imagery and philosophical suggestiveness is almost Elizabethan as the poet describes his body losing ‘interest/in the distinction between/Me and Not Me’...”
—John Taylor, The Antioch Review