It is ten years since the death of Michael Donaghy at the age of 50. He was already regarded as a star of his generation, the darling of those who know, a practitioner and commentator widely admired and only due to be more so. Don Paterson was a friend as well as one of those contemporary admirers and, as a proven critic, is the ideal author for this first full-length study. The book he has produced might serve to deter many others from trying to add more to it.
After an introduction of personal memoir, biographical detail and a summary of the poems themselves, Paterson takes 50 poems from Donaghy's four published volumes and provides essays on each, full of interpretation, relevant connections to Donaghy's life and thought to fill in many of the gaps in our appreciation we might come away from the poems with. Donaghy was clearly a fine poet and wrote poems that were easy to like but many of us perhaps suspected that there was more to it than we thought. One is grateful for Paterson's guide through them and the poems are further enhanced for the greater insight it offers.
The poems have a sureness of touch, and linguistic facility, that can almost disguise the predominantly dark themes. He could be called 'metaphysical' in his treatment of ideas, use of conceits and the shifting, elusive way he engages with the fallen, debased world and, it has to be said, in the best poems and throughout, mortality is a recurrent theme never too far from the surface.
In The Tuning,
The angel of death came in the form of a moth
And landed on the lute I was repairing.
He leaves his workshop with the angel who turns from a moth into a woman and sings,
inhuman intervals through her human throat,
The notes at impossible angles justified.
The lute man realizes that, having heard such music, he can't go back and, as Paterson explains, 'all human sound is ruined for him', and commits suicide by bashing himself repeatedly over the head with a rock and becomes 'safe', because,
For Donaghy, 'alive' implied a zone of pain and of constant threat.
Paterson's introduction explains how Michael Donaghy was so immediately liked by everyone he met, with a charm that was almost irresistible, but possibly this was by a sustained, conscious effort. (Only last week, I was talking to someone who met Donaghy, years ago, not knowing who he was at first, and he didn't disagree with that). He returns regularly to Donaghy's image of 'white noise' and radio interference as a symbol of the beyond. In 'Smith', which Paterson has made the title poem of this annotated selection,
The poet believes that who we are to one another is far more important than who we are to ourselves.
All of these examples look like attempts to escape from the real, deceptions to evade something worse. Smith is, of course, the standard name that a couple might use to sign into a hotel if their presence together there is best left untraced. It sounds like 'myth', and Donaghy explores the profound necessity of the lie, the false signature and Smith forges a thing 'unalterable as iron'. But, furthermore, Paterson once asked Donaghy if the poem was true and was told,
' For Chrissake- of course it wasn't!'
Paterson's method in this book, taking a poem at a time in the same way that his book on Shakespeare's Sonnets does, is that used by Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Ruth Padel twice, to name only four very successful books of commentary. Where once it might have been thought preferable to take the opposite view and bring poems together in thematic essays, taking a bit from one and then from another, or trawl through them chronologically, this attention to one poem at a time is surely how the reading of poems works and, in the hands of an expert or even merely competent critic, the themes emerge quite naturally anyway.
In a more than ideal world, every book of poems could be published complete with a pundit's annotation but not so many poets are worthy of it and it isn't always worth doing. We can do it for ourselves most of the time. It is only when work is established and complex enough to warrant such treatment that a book like this justifiable.
Privacy is a rare enough poem in which Paterson unearths a political edge in Donaghy where he considers the grandiose burial sites of some affluent Victorians, and from other ages. Some had a bell fitted in the coffin so that if, as did happen, some were buried before being completely brain dead they could ring for attention and be dug up again if they happened to wake up, but,
Sadly, these have snapped.
as has any connection with the impressively but disregarded long dead, any sympathy with the death penalty (for the poet) and, Paterson suggests, the credibility of the old Conservative 'Back to Basics' campaign which we all saw all too quickly go back to the basics of politicians themselves being corrupt and hypocritical.
There is a double advantage in this book in having some wonderful poems with the added insight of a sympathetic, and brilliant, interpreter. As soon as I saw it was due, it became longingly awaited and luckily that wasn't for too long. It has delivered much already, up to and beyond expectations, and there is plenty more to find and re-read. It will be hard to follow in the area of Donaghy Studies but there are enough poems left for Paterson or anybody else who feels up to it to work on. Among poetry books of the last few decades, not many are as essential as this.
