Michael Donaghy
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Poet and musician, born May 24 1954; died September 16 2004
The American poet Michael Donaghy, was a New Yorker who had made his home in London. He was a leading figure in the richly talented generation of poets who emerged in the 1980s, as well as an Irish traditional musician of repute.
Donaghy was born into an Irish family and grew up in the Bronx. He studied at Fordham University and the University of Chicago, where he edited the Chicago Review and founded the acclaimed Irish music ensemble Samradh Music. In 1985, he moved to London to join his partner and fellow musician Maddy Paxman, whom he married in 2003.
Rapidly establishing himself on the poetry scene, he published his first full collection, Shibboleth, in 1988. Errata followed in 1993, and Conjure in 2000. Recognition came in the form of the Geoffrey Faber and Cholmondeley awards and the Whitbread and Forward prizes, among others. He also continued to play in various Irish music groups, as well as the early line-up of Lammas, the innovative jazz/traditional crossover band led by Tim Garland and the poet Don Paterson.
Donaghy was a learned poet, with large resources of reading in science and music as well as literature. He can be seen in a line of descent from scholarly American formalists like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, but his gift for dramatic immediacy, and his crossing of mandarin and vernacular language, enabled his work to avoid the academicism that sometimes afflicts the recent generation of American so-called new formalists, with whom he was never truly aligned.
An early reviewer described Donaghy as "a streetwise don", which suggests something of the startling wit and ingenuity with which he explored a metaphysical poet's taste for paradox as an instrument of seduction: "So much is chance,/ So much agility, desire, and feverish care,/ As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove/ Who only by moving can balance,/ only by balancing move." (Machines).
More than one contemporary poet could display such cleverness (it was a smart generation); few, though, could achieve the emotional weight that Donaghy's work gradually disclosed, or the lyric directness of the late poems. He specialised in richly furnished monologues, whose narrators are not so much untrustworthy as vertiginously unmoored from certainty. "Smith", for example, must invent an identity during lovemaking, "[forging] a thing unalterable as iron".
A beguiling playfulness serves to emphasise the depths of anxiety and melancholia over which Donaghy's superb ear leads us - feelings perhaps rooted in Catholicism. He retains the Catholic sense of scale and labyrinthine ingenuity; in City Of God, a mad, failed priest, obsessed with the medieval memory arts, believes "the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind/ could find the secret order of the world/ and remember every drop on every face/ in every summer thunderstorm."
Later, in the shocking Black Ice And Rain, from Conjure, even the consolations of such an imagined order are removed, as the narrator pitilessly passes on his dreadful tale of friendship and catastrophe to an unsuspecting party guest.
The birth, in 1996, of their son Ruairi was a great joy to Maddy and Michael. Michael was a devoted father, and the presence of Ruairi seems to have lent the poems a new richness and intimacy. Conjure closes with Haunts, addressed to his son as though in the far future, but also spoken "here, alive, one Christmas long ago,/ when you were three, upstairs asleep", a final, deeply moving paradox in which, as tradition requires, the poem escapes the constraints of time.
In the literary world, Donaghy was widely loved for his natural charm, kindness, courtesy and humour, as well as for his enduringly boyish good looks. He was a wonderful - at times, uproarious - companion, mischievously delighted by human absurdity, especially the folie de grandeur of critics, editors and avant-gardistes.
An acute critic himself, he published little, but his 1999 monograph Wallflowers showed a rigorous and original mind at work. He was also an inspiring teacher, whose classes, at the City University and Birkbeck College, London, encouraged a number of acclaimed poets, among them Paul Farley and John Stammers.
Donaghy's concern for poetry as art, rather than mere self-expression, was apparent in every aspect of his work, not least in his legendary public readings. In 2001, when we did a national tour together for the Poetry Book Society, night after night Michael would perform, spellbindingly from memory.
A particular highlight was his rendering of Keats's Ode To Melancholy ("No, no, go not to Lethe"), which threw a bridge across the division between poetry on the page and in performance, without sacrificing an iota of seriousness. Poetry in recent times has had few finer advocates or practitioners. He will come to be seen as one of the representative poets of the age.
Sean O'Brien The Guardian Obituary Page September 24, 2004
