Conjure. By Michael Donaghy. Picador. 49pp, £7.99 in UK
Dances Learned Last Night: Poems 1975-1995. By Michael Donaghy. Picador. 128pp, £7.99 in UK
In a recent interview, Chicago-born Michael Donaghy remembers being congratulated on winning the Whitbread Prize by that most English of poets, D. J. Enright. When he won the Faber prize, too, he says, "he was asking me `So, when will you be going home to America?' " Though they frequently revisit the US, Donaghy's poems have been hanging around on this side of the Atlantic for more than a decade now.
The editor of Poetry Review, Peter Forbes, coined the phrase "new plain style" to promote the work of Donaghy and other "New Generation Poets", but in Donaghy's case "new elliptic style" would be nearer the mark. Like Don Paterson, Donaghy is a practised spoofer, given to inventing medieval Welsh poets and Oriental sages, and to following a line like "My father's sudden death has shocked us all" with "I've just made it up". But behind its present-day meaning, Conjure comes from the verb "to swear together", and Donaghy's prestidigitation is more than a self-indulgent or solitary art. The first poem in the book, "The Excuse", uses typical Donaghy tricksiness and non-communication to movingly elegiac effect.
The title of "5:00/5:10/5:15" suggests a further affinity to Don Paterson, for those who remember all the train timetable poems in God's Gift to Women, but this is another study in painful leavetaking:
This is no dream: It's 5:15.?
I wake. I pack. Before I go
I'll press my ear against your back -
a hostage at a wall to hear
one beat. No. Two beats fall.
"Regarding Our Late Correspondence" and "Haunts" continue this mood. When he loses the playfulness, as in "Black Ice and Pain", there's a danger of mawkishness taking over. One way of keeping this at bay is the more fantastical side of the book, as in "Irena of Alexandria" and "Quease" (though "Absolvum te" is very ropey Latin).
Another piece in this vein, "The Palm", tells the tale of a Cannes hotel which, much to his disgust, Paul de Man finds himself sharing with Django Reinhardt and other jazzmen (while studying at Chicago, Donaghy "had the honour of being asked to leave the room" by the infamous deconstructionist). Music has featured in Donaghy's work before, notably in the sequence "O'Ryan's Belt" from Errata, reprinted (along with his other previous collection, Shibboleth) in Dances Learned Last Night.
It's hard to think of a poet other than Ciaran Carson who has written as well about Irish music. It's surprising, in fact, that the Irish culture industry hasn't made more of an effort to claim him as one of our own. As these books show, he's well worth having.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Michael Donaghy will be among those reading at the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin on Friday, October 6th, at 7 p.m. as part of the launch celebration for the American poetry issue of the literary journal "Metre", guest edited by Chris Agee, who will also participate in the readings and round table discussion. Admission free.