Joseph Donahue (born 1954
) is an American poet, critic, and editor. Born in
Dallas, Texas
Dallas () is the third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 million people. It is the largest city in and seat of Dallas County w ...
and growing up in
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...
, Donahue attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree and went on to Columbia University and lived for many years in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. He now resides in
Durham Durham most commonly refers to:
*Durham, England, a cathedral city and the county town of County Durham
*County Durham, an English county
* Durham County, North Carolina, a county in North Carolina, United States
*Durham, North Carolina, a city in N ...
,
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
, where he is a Professor of the Practice at
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
.
Poetry collections by Joseph Donahue
* ''Before Creation'' (1989)
* ''Monitions of the Approach'' (1991)
* ''World Well Broken'' (1995)
* ''Terra Lucida'' (1998)
* ''Terra Lucida XVI-XX'' (1999)
* ''Incidental Eclipse'' (2003)
* ''In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI-XL'' (2004)
* ''Dark Church'' (2015)
* ''Red Flash on a Black Field'' (2015)
* ''Wind Maps I-VII'' (2018)
* ''The Disappearance of Fate'' (2019)
*
*
Anthologies edited by Joseph Donahue
* ''Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry'' (1996; with Edward Foster and Leonard Schwartz)
* ''The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time'' (2002; with Edward Foster)
Critical reception
Of Donahue's collection ''Incidental Eclipse,''
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...
has written "Something is going under, something is coming to the surface; each is documented by two voices, one speaking in italics. There is little comfort here, but there is glamor in the inevitable, 'incidental' screen of darkness moving across the light. This sequence confirms Donahue as one of the major American poets of this time."
Of the same collection, the poet
Gustaf Sobin has stated that "In these sustained breath-strips, life's disparate, hopelessly disassociated elements find themselves spliced into single, all-inclusive sequences. In associating myth with matter, our deepest longings with our most dire anxieties, Donahue strikes an uninterrupted series of grace notes..."
References
American male poets
Living people
1954 births
20th-century American poets
20th-century American male writers
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