John Donlan & The Dames

Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald (monstersandcritics.com, July 21, 2008)

Spirit Engine by John Donlan

Brick Books

John Donlan's lyric work seeks the connection between lives "not just the life of a coyote and the life of a man, or the peaceful cacophony of a pond in summer and the life of the human listener"but between the life before birth, and the life after. He reveals the wilderness to us moment by moment, while simultaneously driving us back into our own nature "a process readers, lifted by Donlan's imagery, rhythms, and insights, can only experience as pure pleasure. Here beauty is the engine that enspirits the mind, freeing us from contemporary despair and the illusion we've left nature behind.

Devil's Paintbrush

In my slow-burning archive orange hawkweed
thrives in granite-charactered soil
spalled off the basement stone,
a beaver labours up her steep skid road

logging poplar for food and shelter,
wind drives rivers of ripples down a pond.
Everything here knows what to do.

I investigate every valve, work and rework
notes to husks, skeletal remains,
survivors who revive experience.
I try to memorize, to make some pictures

to walk into, in the final time
when I can't walk or hear or see, and see
lake-cradling pink granite, its orange earth,
its skin of lives flickering, flickering.

Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald