Jesus Said
poems by Patrick Donnelly
32 pp. / paper / $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-9964397-3-2
Printed in a limited edition of 250 copies
Publication Date: July 4, 2017
ABOUT THE BOOK
In a moving sequence of poems, Patrick Donnelly addresses a Jesus of his own Rilkean imagining—a personal, intimate, fluid manifestation of the divine who seamlessly embodies elements of Eastern and Western religious traditions.
PRAISE FOR JESUS SAID
“In lyrics wry and soulful, Donnelly suggests the gay boy can count himself in. Donnelly’s sound and approach I’d thought might never come back again. What excites me about these poems is how alive Jesus is, how personal and real: Jesus is available as he once was for George Herbert. Poets of the last generation, from O’Hara to Bishop, seemed to do away with Jesus. Donnelly writes: ‘I told Jesus, for thirty years I asked you to send me someone to love, and then Stephen came and we married, but we were old, so I begged you, keep us alive, let us live a little longer.’ I am grateful for such a sweet clean original gospel.”
—Spencer Reece
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Donnelly is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012), and Little-Known Operas, forthcoming from Four Way Books. He is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, and an associate editor of Poetry International. With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), which was awarded the 2015–2016 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Donnelly is the recipient of a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. He was named 2015–2017 Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.