When the poet Michael Donaghy died in 2004 at the age of fifty, he left behind three slim volumes of poetry and a computer file called “Safest,” containing the poems in this posthumous collection. Born in the Bronx, Donaghy moved in 1985 to London, where he became associated with the New Generation of British poets—a distinguished roster of Young Turks that includes Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, and others. Though his early death will likely occlude the fact, Donaghy was perhaps the finest of the bunch.
His poems adhere in memory the way all durable poems do, phrase by phrase, line by line, until one has succumbed completely to their spell. And “spell” is the mot juste for Donaghy: his poems are musical utterances (almost incantations at times) meant to ward off dread and the pain of loss. A poet only needs a handful of first-rate poems to stake a claim for posterity, and Donaghy had more than his share: “Machines,” “Black Ice and Rain,” “Haunts,” “Caliban’s Books,” and others.
This book is, therefore, both a welcome and a melancholy event: one is grateful for the new poems but saddened to note that, aside from a few drawer pieces and drafts, they are all we shall have. Among them are a few to stand with Donaghy’s finest, such as the striking “Akhmatova Variations” and “From the Safe House,” a dramatic monologue in the vein of “Black Ice and Rain” that revisits old relationships now consigned irrevocably to the past:
I have sent them you then, to the farm you planned,
to the heat haze in which you seem to waver,
where you lie beneath the same unsteerable wreck
your wife taught me to drive when you were drunk
and which I still own a seventh of, let’s not forget,
(Tell him we never slept together, Claire)instead of now, when I hear of your death,
after your stroke at my age give a month or two,
now, when you never made it to Mexico
and Claire remarried and never had children
and the clapboard safe house fell down at last
and the blue pick up went for scrap years back.
Horribly, the same specter of early death that haunts “From the Safe House” came for Donaghy himself in the end. This final collection (which so far has only appeared in England) confirms that, though there are relatively few of them, his poems will not go for scrap but be read for years to come.