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"Poems as they should be written--impatiently, impassionedly, intelligently, impertinently." --F.D. Reeve
Excerpt
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Donatello's Version
by James Scully
"James Scully's fierce moral intelligence, poetic craft and grim humor are all alive and well in this long-awaited collection."--Adrienne Rich
(View all blurbs.)
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Adrienne Rich notes in her introduction to James Scully's classic study, Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, that Scully's essays and poems "refuse to soothe or simplify, to shortchange either poetry or the imperative for social revolution. His fiercely demystifying intelligence is grounded in hope and realism for poetry in itself along with other forms of dissident engagement."
Written as the War on Terror morphed into an Imperial War, Donatello’s Version carries on the Public Poetry tradition of such writers as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Horace, Juvenal, Dante, Milton, and Blake. These poems arise from the premise that words matter, that the res publica (the human value that individuals in a community place above their own self interest) also matters, and that the voice of the poet can make a difference.
Most current poetry tends to slide off 'what is.' Consequently the significance of 9-11, which inaugurated a geopolitical power grab that includes Constitutional government itself, has been met with poetic silence. In Donatello's Version post 9-11 reality is re-viewed through Hamlet, Donatello's David, Lazarus and Coltrane. The world is one of Wild Trees, the ultimate Star Chamber of Abu Ghraib, Strange Words, screaming Donkeys, Scleroderma, Gitmo and Babble . . . where the cultural and moral infrastructure of civic life is, as it has long been, broken. Collective values have to be reconstituted, but on what bases? Nothing can be taken for granted. This is a poetry of questions, impasses and revelations rather than answers.
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