Daniel Donaghy

““Donaghy writes brilliantly about growing up in a hard-scrabble neighborhood in Philadelphia, and explores complexities of love and sorrow, shame and gratitude.””

“Daniel Donaghy is a courageous, risk-taking poet; he’s a truth teller who draws an unflinching picture of life in a dying Philadelphia neighborhood after white flight and racial tensions escalate. He makes us feel his own humiliation and shame, a kind of shadow he carries with him even into adulthood and the suburban life he’s made for himself, his wife, and children. These are beautiful, tender, painful, unforgettable poems. I love them because they make me remember what it means to be human.”

“Somerset begins where “dome light leaks through tinted windows/thumping at intersections.” Lehigh Street, Kensington—Philly in the ‘80s, the El clacking and sparking overhead. Each intersection thereafter hopped up on its own electric energy: intersection of weed and wet, hooker and Strangler. The four-square intersections framing Needle Park. The fire-framed intersection of the Philly P.D. and the Africas. Intersection where a racist father rips a bike from a black kid and presents it to his son with pride. Yet dome light, streetlight, lamplight, sunlight—everywhere the light leaks through, falls on the indomitable mother, the pregnant wife, the wide-eyed wonderous daughters, friends here and in memory, glints off the windows of the Aramingo Diner, the old Starlite Ballroom, a gold crucifix around a neck. This collection is the one that Daniel Donaghy, Kenzo kid, has been writing toward his entire life, here the consummate formal craftsman of poem after candid, tough, unflinching poem. We can face it all and sometimes even face it down, they tell us; we can ‘rise/together, laughing, toward our evenings.’”

“In Somerset, Daniel Donaghy has composed a page-turning, lyrical collection that provides a tragicomic reminiscence of Philadelphia. Donaghy is a master storyteller, and each poem provides a candid and at times touching snapshot of neighborhoods and families who fight and love at all cost. Poems like “What I Did While Wayne Called the Cops” and “The Background Noise I’ve Heard All My Life” are confessional while capturing the youthful innocence that comes with living in the inner city. Throughout the book, Donaghy brings us into the streets of Philadelphia in a way that makes the reader feel like he, too, has lived there, like he, too, has taken the trains, like he, too, has lived in the same apartments and houses that inspired these poems. Few collections can capture the essence of a city the way that Somerset does.”

“Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an ‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school, get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot through with loss and, finally, redemption.”

“Poem after poem offers the consolation of a thoughtful human spirit who struggles with the blackness and is not broken. Never peripheral to human experience, Donaghy’s poems, centered in the heart, teach us to persevere.”

“Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you by the collar and compel you to listen.”

“Dan Donaghy could have been a stonecutter, but he chose to work something harder. Amazing, in these finely sculpted poems, how beautiful trouble and loss and pain can be, how excruciatingly pleasureable. We begin, and so often end, in trouble, a fact these poems do not deny. But, still, Donaghy tells us, trouble is not all we have.”

“Streetfighting is a racy, sobering book about the vicissitudes of an urban childhood. Every poem has the ring of authenticity—the observed, the suffered, the mourned—but only because the language of every poem is wound tight as a fist. The poems tell everything, but they explain nothing: they revel in the weird inexplicability of the most ordinary human lives. Even the darkest poems feel joyous, buoyed by the energy of their language: read the first poem, and you won’t be able to stop—you’ll swallow the whole, and the final poem will change you.”

“The Irish boys hanging out on the corner with their DA hairdos and smart-aleck talk. Hitching rides under the bumpers of trucks, the corner bars, the fights, the boys that ended up in jail—the whole grimy, rich, stick-ball scene brought back in a rush. (Only for me it was the Brooklyn Dodgers instead of the Phillies.) Donaghy has recreated not only a childhood and a family, but a whole neighborhood and a way of life replete with its grim realities and terrible beauties.”

“Consistently throughout this very fine first book of poems is a precision of diction and an almost impeccable care for words that has the power to lift these poems, and the lives that inhabit them, somehow off the page, and then deep into our brains. I like too the unusual and engaging angle of vision of these poems, a lingering seductive kind of observation characterized most accurately by Mr. Donaghy’s own words: “Often we cannot read the gesture/ until the figure becomes background.” This is an entertaining book that is a true joy to read.”

“In Streetfighting Daniel Donaghy writes unswervingly about a gritty urban environment, and what in a lesser talent would have been simply depressing, a mother smearing her son’s face with a crushed lightning bug, or a boy falling from a high catwalk, “so quietly/ no one else knew he was gone,” we find instead small acts of courage and compassion, even a kind of grace achieved while playing basketball and street baseball, and most importantly a coming-to-terms with the past, with parents, with wrongs committed. Donaghy has more than enough talent and wisdom to pull it off in this brilliant debut collection.”