Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)

• Published in: Books in Canada Vol. 33; no. 7; p. 37
• Main Author: Swift, Todd
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto Canadian Review of Books Ltd 01.10.2004
• Subjects: Donaghy, Michael
• ISSN: 0045-2564

[Michael Donaghy]'s poetry--which was broadly formalist, and often touches on themes of fate, loss, and mutability--had been increasingly admired since 2000. It was in this year that his third book, Conjure (from Picador) won the Forward Poetry Prize for "Best Poetry Collection of the Year" and was selected in The Observer, by Melvyn Bragg as his "book of the year". However, it was about a decade before then that Donaghy's first collection, Shibboleth, won the Whitbread Poetry Award, in 1989, first establishing him as one of the four or so major new poets of the 90s in Britain. Many poets win awards. What keeps a poet necessarily in the minds of others (poet and reader alike) long enough for their work to survive time and the canon's desert crossing are the clutch of very good poems each true poet is given to make; and those lines that strike out from the poems as sparks with their own afterglow. Michael Donaghy wrote perhaps twelve or so of the best poems given to us since 1975. Among these: "Machines"; "The Present"; "The Bacchae"; "Cruising Byzantium"; "My Flu" and "The Drop". These will secure his name in anthologies yet to be imagined.