Customer Reviews

Capture the Flag

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Susan Donnelly's book, Capture the Flag, captured me from Nag's Head, NC, to Knoxville, TN, on a recent return home from vacation. A mark of a truly good poem is that it urges the reader to read it again and again. The reasons may be varied: layers of meaning, a jarring revelation, or simply the incredible beauty of language and sound. Regardless, all point to some kind of transferable truth - a truth we can each understand and own. Donnelly moves her reader through many stages and settings, all the while creating that feeling of shared truth and commonality. She creates highly memorable lines within excellent verse: "Somehwere there's a woman who could take charge of all this, roll up her sleeves and triage. You don't love that woman." I highly recommend this book of poetry - yet another excellent publication by Iris Press.

Personal but never cheaply confessional, able to move from Cambridge to Donegal to Falujah withough losing focus, this poems are superbly crafted and a delight to read.

There's such a torrent of indifferent verse rushing at the reader these days that it's easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel the difficulty of spotting the good stuff amongst all the flotsam, to wonder sometimes if there's really any good stuff to spot. There is. The poems in Susan Donnelly's "Capture the Flag" are clear, strong, pointed, necessary, satisfying. They make a person want to read poetry again, not run away and hide from it. They make a person want to write poetry to converse with these poems, with this poet. "Capture the Flag" is most highly recommended.

In Capture the Flag, Susan Donnelly's poems stay close to the earth, the ground, the real, the bud, flower and withering of everyday life and life history. At the same time, they point in various directions that take us off the earth, always with earned, weighted, clear and clean thought. The poems are made of unaffected natural speech that the poet's fine but unobtrusive craft has formed into organic wholes. Her words are somehow mysteriously filled, solid, but not heavy. The stories the poems tell are rich and honest and humorous, tuned to irony and very often uncovering turns meaning that I recognize as true but never knew were there. I go back to these poems because they make me think about my own life--beauty and loss, love and fear, the perils and joys of living in the world. Reading, I overhear and participate in a real conversation a woman is having with herself and others, a conversion, if you will, of life and perception to language. What stays with me most is the human, womanly, earthly voice of the poems.

Susan Donnelly has created a treasure in this book of poetry. Her verse is readable and re-readable. Cover art by quilt artist Bobbie Sullivan is remarkable.