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9781961897304

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Heartbreaking, gorgeous, seamless, smart, Willow Hammer is a stunning gift of honesty and generosity. In the central sequence, Patrick Donnelly takes us through a dazzling stream of imagistic, linguistic, and literary associations to arrive at emotional, as well as factual truths about a family crime. Sister begets willow and moon; Billy begets names and cherries; mother begets milk begets moon, and back again to willow, with myth and religion among the frequent reference points. Book-ending this astonishing series are personal poems of sexuality that will be familiar to the poet's readers, put here in the larger context of family and presented with hard-won wisdom. When the poet says, near the end of the book, ""I think I can sleep now,"" you will be with him. Meanwhile, you won't be able to put this astonishing book down. --Martha Collins The poet asks, ""But what if we're sentenced to orbit some cold giant we never seem to glimpse or forgive?"" This is a book about contending with that cold giant in all its forms--in the culture, in the people who have raised us, as well as in ourselves--all the while knowing that the great forces of spirit and sexuality nourish and deplete us at once. Wry, haunted, tender, attuned to the body and all its hungers, Willow Hammer extends Patrick Donnelly's already substantive vision and lifts it to an exquisite plateau. --Paul Lisicky What a pleasure to read Willow Hammer, the mordant wit and singular lines of Patrick Donnelly's poems--myth ""the usual Ovid shitshow,"" innocence ""indeed a kind of insanity""--disabused yet full of empathy. This is a spiritual, feral, analytical poetry, one of violence and erotic control and the limits of etymology. The end result is masterful, haunting, and revelatory. --Randall Mann

Author Information

Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is program director of The Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts at Robert Frost's old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly's translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly's other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award.

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