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This finely crafted collection takes us on a personal journey to places of love, leaning, longing, and quickly belonging. Richly evocative poems in and of Paris that twist and turn like the narrow staircases of Haussmannian apartment buildings. Studded with literature, painting and cinema, each poem is a portrait of the city in the changing seasons as the young poet sits and sips, drinking in the people and their promise. Donnelly is a romantic who captures the hope and heat of summer, conveys the losses, the strummed cords now cut, the echoes that could not be contained. A sumptuous book of six sequences that offer a linear narrative of having and holding, of latching on, laying down and letting go. Paris gives lessons in love, glitters and sparkles as the poet makes his way across the Seine, over bridges and on the metro, in pursuit of the other, as the sun sets and rises on the City of Lights. Sensual poems that play with slippage and disappearance, repercussions and illusion, as our protagonist, older now, rummages in Sunday markets of memory, sits looking back on crowded squares of desire.
Paul Stephenson, author of Selfie with Waterlilies www.paulstep.com
Damien Donnelly has alighted on the Irish poetry world like an unignorable force of nature over the last little while. His first collection vividly evokes a Paris in which the ghosts of Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara present the reader with a kind of postmodern tango. Long may Donnelly’s word dance continue.
Kevin Higgins, author of Sex and Death in Merlin Park Hospital, co-creator of Over the Edge
Enough! by Damien B. Donnelly, is a beautiful, lyrical, and rhythmic meditation, a testimony to personal ‘coming-of-age’, a romance and denouncement with startling imagery (the eruptions of desire and anger abound), a Paris of tacky-gaudy tourism, ecstatic desire, philosophical musing and broken love. With its homage/ reference to film, art, architecture, bohemian neighbourhoods, its tropes of Paris and inner-outer geographies, landscapes of self and other situate intricacies of life through memory: its traces, losses, the enjambments of time, place, identity and self-emerging. Via rites of passage, Donnelly’s journeys from Ireland to France, in the spirit of Beckett, Joyce, and other sojourners, is a Barthesian voyage of details through a queering lens, a narrative of the poet’s developing artistic techniques, an invocation to lovers, and a paean to Donnelly’s relationships to art, poetry, the ghosts of history. In rapture, Damien holds the reader’s attention. Raptly. A gem of a collection, ecstatic, dreamy, vibrant and brutal by turns.
Robert Frede Kenter, publisher/EIC of Ice Floe Press, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions, 2021), etc.
The adage ‘happiness paints white’ is disproved in the vibrant, and richly coloured poems of Damien Donnelley - who, with a painter’s eye, offers an exuberant portrait of a life lived fully and with great joy. These are poems that take you to the party, pour you a drink and intoxicate you - they are witty, insightful, highly entertaining and full of compassion, humanity and exhilarating adventures. A writer of great verve and energy, with a deliciously rich and complex voice, reading Damien is a joy. Take a deep breath before diving in!
Anna Saunders, founder/CEO Cheltenham Poetry Festival, author of Communion, Kissing the She Bear, Struck, Burne Jones & the Fox, Ghosting for Beginners and Feverfew.
