Author Description

This to That and Thus contains four separate complete collections, the author's first four books, thus demonstrating the wellsprings of a remarkable career. "For a poetry that yields such immediate and immense pleasure, the work of Joseph Donahue remains hard to characterize. Joseph Donahue has spent [four] decades crafting a sensibility that straddles the often-reductive binaries of literary discourse. As sacred as it is profane, as popular as it is avant-garde, and as funny as it is forlorn, Donahue's poetry puts forward a voice that resists easy categorization. While there are many aesthetic reasons that make Donahue's poetry difficult to encapsulate, the most pressing obstruction to characterizing his poetry is the little precedence that exists for such an endeavor." -J. Peter Moore, Jacket2 "For sheer invention and sheer beauty, there is little around at all that can match such a book." -Nathaniel Tarn, Plume, on Wind Maps "'Hints and symbols die out./ All's actual now.' These lines seem to contain the germ of Joseph Donahue's massive, mesmerizing new book, Incidental Eclipse. 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." -John Ashbery, on Incidental Eclipse (2003)