Willow Hammer

Willow Hammer is a consummate lyric of the aftermath. In his fifth book, Patrick Donnelly has his face pressed against the eyepiece as he looks unsparingly at the past, generating a sequence of poems that fans out kaleidoscopically upon learning, twenty years afterward, that his stepfather assaulted his sister. In response to this crime, Donnelly traces the consequences of ignorance, denial, bargaining, complicity, and finally revelation that reverberated through his and his loved ones' lives for five decades. His discovery of this catalyzing violation not only recontextualizes the siblings' shared history, but inflects the present as--finding analogues of his sister's abuse in the classical canon--he remembers his escape from home into spiritual disciplines and the study of dead languages. Revisiting the evolution of his own sexuality, he remembers singing a Byrd Mass after a night at a gay bathhouse, characterizing the tenor and bass as "two wrestling saints," "lowest of the four voices-- / once I thought I saw them kiss each other's faces."

And that--recovering glimpses of his sister's unknowable interiority, reckoning with a truth that is unbearable and inescapable--is this book's difficult and endless work. In the wake of a particular kind of harm, Willow Hammer seems to suggest, justice may be a wishful concept--but that doesn't preclude testimony and salvage. "Now" documents the poet's arrival at this compromise: "I remember my / little sister that was, / little willow of glass / upon whom he laid / his hammer hands." There is no revocation of the hands, but with tenderness, wit, and fury, Donnelly's lyrics refuse to let their shadow obscure his sister's recovery of her own agency.