Poetry

"In the Night Watch Poems, B. G. Donohue finds the wide chinks of light in the dark.. These are powerful, complex and beautiful, perfectly measured and crafted. In his search for the Divine, Donohue discovers a fertile ground." - Colum McCann, National Book Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Pushcart Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, et.al. Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, Hunter College

By its evocation of a real or imaged heroic age, its contrasts of character and its variety of adventure, above all by its sheer narrative power, the Odyssey has won and preserved its place among the greatest tales in the world. It tells of Odysseus' adventurous wanderings as he returns from the long war at Troy to his home in the Greek island of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus have been waiting for him for twenty years. He meets a one-eyed giant, Polyphemus the Cyclops; he visits the underworld; he faces the terrible monsters Scylla and Charybdis; he extricates himself from the charms of Circe and Calypso. After these and numerous other legendary encounters he finally reaches home, where, disguised as a beggar, he begins to plan revenge on the suitors who have for years been besieging Penelope and feasting on his own meat and wine with insolent impunity.

Odysseys: An unfulfilled woman finds romance in an unlikely place; a young female pioneer finds rescue and renewal in a Lakota Indian warrior; an insecure American-Italian girl finds a sense of identity in an Italian village; and a pampered woman mends a broken friendship.

These are the poems of a Christian pilgrim, a mercurial, twenty-first century believer-priest who characterizes himself, from the outset, as a highly problematic nomad. Poem after poem suggests that, in our postmodern era, one's identity, if ungrounded in the eternal Word, may yield at best either a vanishing semblance of macroscopic reality or its probabilistic trace. That, of course, is the predicament confronted by any compulsive wanderer--a crisis as perceptual in its implications as it is spiritual. Yet the lyrics in On the Care and Feeding of Robots never seek to celebrate a static reality. In other words, here, it is far more than the romantic desire for permanence that agitates the speaker; rather, it is fear of the imminent loss of his spacewalker's dream life that unsettles him. To live as a shuttle astronaut in a universe without access to its numinous meanings is to exist as no more than a ghostly qwiff--a wave ripple in a virtual world.