Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2000, and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Conjure
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Amazon Review
This collection of poems by Michael Donaghy begins impressively. The first poem, "The Excuse", is a comic-but-elegiac, sly-yet-touching riff on the pain of losing and remembering a father: "'My father's sudden death has shocked us all', Even me, and I've just made it up". The second, equally sensitive poem "Not Knowing the Words", also deals with a dead father, but this time gently and eloquently argues with itself as to how the father's void can be filled. Then there's the fourth poem, "Black Ice and Rain". This is a true tour de force: a shocking, troubling, mercurial, coolly erotic and beautiful poem on love, loss, guilt and secrecy:
and where I've hoped to hear my name gasped out, from cradle, love bed, death bed, there instead I catch her voice, her broken lisp, his name.It would be very difficult for any poet to sustain this very high quality of writing, and Donaghy doesn't. Later on in Conjure there is more than one insubstantial lyric, the odd bit of hack writing, some shorter verses that could have been excluded. But just when you are getting wearied Donaghy throws up another absolute gem, another breathtaking poem which sparkles with his tell-tale wit, demotic bathos, verbal dexterity, emotional candour, pure lyrical style and formal diversity. --Sean Thomas
Book Description
Conjure is Michael Donaghy’s third collection, and his most accomplished to date, displaying the same trademark elegance, sleight of hand and philosophical wit that have established his reputation as a ‘poet’s poet’. But while these poems time their feints and punches as well as ever, often the poet’s guard is deliberately kept down: Conjure’s elegies and disappearing acts, love songs and tortuous journeys represent the most challenging, vulnerable and moving work Donaghy has yet written. ‘Among the finest American poets of his generation’ Robert McPhillips ‘The artistry of Donaghy’s work seems to me exemplary’ Sean O’Brien ‘The fine-tuned precision of a twelve-speed bike’ Alfred Corn
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Borges says somewhere that 'unhappily, all literature is made of tricks, and those tricks get - in the long run - found out'. Michael Donaghy seems to know this, indeed, makes such a notion explicit in his book's title, 'Conjure'. But, while there are poems here that turn themselves inside out, that show their workings like radios with their backs off, there's a much more unobtrusive and subtle vein at work here too. It's good - in a climate where it rains the 'real life', the docu-dramatic - to find a poet this smart, bringing this kind of verve to bear on his material. He can do narrative - 'Black Ice and Rain' is one of his best (and, if you haven't seen it already, you're only a few clicks away from his first two collections, handily collected by Picador as 'Dances Learned Last Night') - but never the kind of long-winded sob story where the only person the poet seems to be tricking is himself. The author once likened our culture to a vast, posh shop, with the security cameras switched off. This is a brilliant book. Long may he ram raid.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Michael Donaghy is arguably the greatest poet now writing in Britain, though he's far from our most prolific. This is only his third collection in twelve years and, indeed, it reads like the product of intense and passionate labour. It's already won him the Forward Prize and has been shortlisted for the Whitbread and T.S. Eliot Prizes - setting a new record in the world of poetry prizes - and luminaries such as Melvyn Bragg and Andrew Motion have listed it as their "book of the year". It would be breathtaking for it's sheer painstaking artistry and verbal texture alone (Donaghy seems to cover more territory in a line than some poets can with an entire poem) but masterpieces such as "Black Ice and Rain", "Annie" and "Not Knowing The Words" - elegies, dramatic monologues and love songs - drive relentlessly and unforgettably to the core of emotional truths. Even the best collections contain the odd tedious poem but this is one of those rare books without a single boring page! Conjure is simply the most moving and imaginative collection of poems I've read for years and should be required reading for anyone seeking passion and intelligence in contemporary poetry.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Conjure is an exquisite collection by a poet who more than any other writing today sings to us. His poems contain an enchanting music which sometimes marries simplicity and beauty together in a way reminiscent of Mozart. But it is not just the song with Donaghy, it is what he makes music about. The lovely little poem Tears, which is short enough to quote in full, gives us a flavour of the world of Conjure:
Tears
are shed, and every day
workers recover
the bloated cadavers
of lovers or lover
who drown in cars this way. /
And they crowbar the door
and ordinary stories pour,
furl, crash, and spill downhill -
as water will - not orient,
nor sparkling, but still
There is a lot of pain in this book, a lot of loss. There is his father, there is the child - looking in wonder and without sadness, and there are signs of a Catholicism lived and left behind. There are terrible facts from history, in 'Where is it written that I must die here' there is a scene so horrible that it gave me a nightmare and haunts the edge of my imaginings, but that is the poet's job - lest we forget and such facts drown in such seas as the Guinness Book of Records. Against the pain and loss there is humour and tenderness and metaphysical fancy. In both the music that he makes and the stories he tells there are beats and images that make us laugh. There is also laughter and delight as he magics words into giving us pictures of mysterious realms.
The love in his poetry is everywhere: it is in the gentle melancholy he displays as what is lost is paid homage, it is there in the sympathy he gives for (nearly) all who appear in his poems, and it is there for his son who possesses this book in a deeper way than a normal dedication would give - the last poem in the book Haunts concerns the poet and his son haunting each other across time. In Proust, time is transcended when some sensation now so mirrors some sensation from our past that we are lifted above time and taken back to our being as it was then; in Haunts three times are brought together, not into a moment above time, but by a magic in which across the years father and son say the words 'Don't be afraid' to each other. In a paradoxical triangle of causality this simple and beautiful sentiment ties together the three times - Conjure shows us many terrifying and distressing things, but this is its true message: Don't be afraid.
Choosing his books of the year for the Observer, Melvyn Bragg said "Conjure contains poems which are as deeply structured, as lucid, moving and witty as Auden at his best". I agree, but there is also something reminiscent of Yeats in Donaghy, both in the music of the words and the astonishing vividness of the pictures he creates. More than anything, tho', he is his own man building a vast and wonderful world for us to delight in and learn from. This is an essential work of poetry of our time and it is a profound pleasure.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
stunning collection
Donaghy's latest collection is a stunning one. Donaghy is an excellent poet. "Black Ice and Rain", one of the better poems, is a tragic narrative/dramatic monologue about... Read more
Published on 13 Jun 2002 by adead_poet@hotmail.com
5.0 out of 5 stars
This should be in everybody's poetry collection
Michael Donaghy writes so beautifully that I have no intention of trying to wax lyrical in his praise - his poems speak for themselves, and far more eloquently than I could hope... Read more
Published on 29 Jun 2001
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intimate, rousing collection by a great poet.
A stirring tongue-in-cheek dialogue of the soul where you discover the tongue is not your own. It left me searching my heart like a many pocketed jacket to pay the tab at Tavern on... Read more
Published on 13 May 2001
3.0 out of 5 stars
Faux - Naive
Picador's blurb tells us that Michael Donaghy's 'Conjure' is a Poetry Book Society Choice, a Forward Prize winner, along with the curious information that Mr. Read more
Published on 24 Mar 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars
A poetry of cool intellect and emotional warmth
Michael Donaghy's new collection is characterised by his familiar combination of great intellectual acuity and emotional intelligence. Read more
Published on 11 Oct 2000
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