Dan Beachy-Quick at the LARB:
THE EDITORS OF VERGE Books, Peter O’Leary and John Tipton, continue to lavish love on books wholly deserving of the care. Take Joseph Donahue’s two-volume Terra Lucida XIII–XXI (2024) as the most current example: Musica Callada and Near Star come housed in a box clad in a deep-loam brown cloth, the color of leaf-rot, fungal fecundity itself. Such care, if it’s truly meaningful, is so only because it adorns a poetry whose nature shares the same cosmic ethic. Joseph Donahue is a poet for whom, couplet by couplet, poetry is the principal way of tuning a life to the deeper orders of the world, where even death’s irreparable rift is a complement to life’s wild loveliness. For Donahue, the poem is the primary tool for understanding the weird work living is.
Each poem feels written with a handmade care that is reflected in the care manifest in the books Verge has made of them. There’s a holiness to the presentation, a kind of reliquary, as if the object-life of the books primes the reader’s attention for sacred spaces; and among all the things reading a poem might be, it fundamentally still is what it has always been—an initiation into the mysteries.
more here.
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