Description
“This is a richly-suggestive, highly-vivid collection of poems, depicting a wide canvas of emotional landscapes with painter-like precision. The intensely visual aspect of Donnelly’s writing is encapsulated in ‘The Irises of our Eyes’, where the poetic speaker is caught up in a visionary experience, where nature, art and language become one.
‘Crazed caught on canvas, caught in colour,
thought tempered in sweeping strokes-
we can be carried away in seas of grass’
It’s no surprise that Donnelly is also a painter and designer and repeated references to colour amplify and intensify emotions in rhapsodic waves of word-pictures, provoking intense feelings of joy and grief, as seen in the poignant ‘Tattered brown trousers’, where the fragilities of a father are darkly-depicted.
‘Eat the Storms’ is a sensory reading experience, with an accessible, appealing and multi-layered voice. Each new reading reveals different shades of meaning and all the nuances of Donnelly’s lyric voice. At once tender and lyrical, there are poignant and troubling moments throughout: the pain of experience – ‘the simple route the river runs, the rustle of the red rose tipped with thorns’; the recurring motif of fragile relationships; the conflicting desires for belonging and freedom; the gut-wrenching theme of being deserted; the complexities of identity and the ever-shifting sense of self we experience – ‘beneath the red ink tipped into this flesh’.
This is a striking, powerful collection, which achieves a balance between a personal, expansive and lyric style and the taut control needed to achieve fine poetry.”
Matthew M. C. Smith – Poet and editor of Black Bough Poetry.
“Damien Donnelly is the archduke of alliteration and a poet in love with colour and sensuality. The poems in this first collection pop with blinding whites, rich reds and purples, and the yellow of Van Gogh sunflowers. They are jazz riffs on journeys, prisms chasing and catching the light. There is darkness too, in lines such as “Father ate all the flowers/in the back garden”, and there are slower poems of self-assessment, including this finely achieved passage in “Red Ink”:
“I am looking
to find a new shape; turning back, returning,
recalling that first mark, to measure how far
from it I ran, to see what was left behind…”
Above all, there is a sweeping positive energy, a welcoming of all that the world has to offer, and a certainty that “dark doors open often into hopeful”.”
Catherine Ann Cullen
“In a pamphlet saturated in colour, Damien Donnelly takes us on an immersive journey through a landscape of pigments. Written with great lyricism and emotional intensity, these poems contrast darker hues with lighter tones to create a sequence of poems that will linger in the memory.”
Jessica Traynor
About Damien B. Donnelly
Damien, 44, Dublin born, returned to Ireland in 2019 after 23 years in Paris, London and Amsterdam, has been writing since childhood, poetry and short stories questioning identity, sexuality and fragility. His daily interests revolve around falling over and learning how to get up again while making delicious cakes. He’s been featured in the books ‘Second Chance’ from Original Writing, ‘Body Horror’ from Gehenna & Hinnom, ‘Nous Sommes Paris’ from Eyewear Publishing and The Runt Magazine. Online, he has been featured in Coffin Bell, Black Bough Poetry, Scribe Base, Barren Magazine. This is his debut collection of poetry and he is honoured to be in the hands of The Hedgehog Press.
Product details
- ISBN: 978-1913499266
- Pages: 34
- Order from Amazon HERE
- Order signed and annotated copies direct from Damien at his web site HERE
“Just occasionally you come across a voice in poetry that is distinctive and unique. Damien Donnelly in his first collection ‘Eat the Storms’ is exactly that.
The world in Donnelly’s poems is a chaotic and turbulent place with no defining truth or reality. Life is problematic and alienating. Humankind has lost its way and the individual is powerless and adrift: ‘I have drowned more, before, on quiet corners, in safe seats,/in non-comforting crowds; dozens all searching/for their own spotlight in place of a single soul.’ One must find one’s own way and to do this one must discover who one is and where one belongs. As a consequence in many of the poems we find Donnelly withdrawing into himself (‘absorbing, reflecting, meditating‘), searching for meaning and questioning ‘creation/and (his) position within it’. He is ‘looking/to find a new shape.’ This is no easy task. In the past he has ducked the challenge, ‘taken flight’, and pretended to be what he is not: ‘stilled the air with performances; shy boy/in the spotlight singing songs he can’t quite/find the notes for, or the right to call his own.‘ So difficult is it to find the answers he is seeking, he wonders if ‘the blind can see better’ than him. Yet he persists: trying to make sense of his past, his relationships and his childhood to resolve unsettled issues, such as the relationship with his father, in the deeply moving ‘Tattered Brown Trousers’.
The poems enact this struggle, yet there is a sustaining optimism: ‘We can’t all be angels but we can rise upon the air we eat/the touch we have tasted, the flesh we have crept from, swept upon,//found a fondness for.’ In the final poem of this short collection he reminds us that ‘black is only a shadow’ and he exhorts us to ‘Come catch the colour, catch the kisses/catch the life racing by in taxis, on trains/under starry night waiting for us to paint them/Behold how much there is to love/to let go of, to learn from.‘
Donnelly’s poetry is beautifully written and dense with vivid imagery, sometimes synesthetic and sometimes surreal. It demands to be read aloud and as one does a kaleidoscope of colour illuminates each page, for these are poems that play on the cultural associations of colours, imbuing them with personal significance and resonance.
This is a writer of real talent, whose first pamphlet rewards reading, reading again and reading again.”
- Nigel Kent, Author of Saudade and Psychopathogen
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