REVIEW

Patrick Donnelly’s The Charge

Donnelly, Patrick. The Charge. Ausable Press, 2003. (104 pages)

The title of Patrick Donnelly’s The Charge can mean many things: attack, task or obligation, the current or life force that runs through us all, finding expression in the thrill between lovers. It is also, as the speaker describes in “Consummatum Est,” the moment he believes he became infected with HIV: “Yes – certainly I felt it – and broke / into a sweat, the exact moment / the charge leapt from him to me.” Once we understand what’s at stake here, the layers of meaning become clear – the task of living and all its obligations, the attack made by the disease itself, the thrill of a lover and all its consequences.
       In this same poem, he compares the moment of the charge to that of women who look back and know the moment they conceived, and to the faith theologians have in what cannot be seen or proven.
In this way he compellingly compares, and we are forced to contrast, the moment life begins to the moment that threatens his life. But it is faith regardless, and as with the mothers and theologians, that faith matters only to oneself.
       As death plays a part in each poem, so too does God. Always within the speaker’s consciousness, God is addressed by turns ironically, earnestly, and tenderly. It’s a God, he acknowledges, who seems not to listen or care, but whose existence is never questioned. Prayers, psalms, and incantations tie the book together. The speaker needs all of these as he confronts the ravages of ill friends, nursing them through sickness and sometimes into death, seeing himself in all of them. Suffused with an emotional and spiritual longing, the poems convey pain without seeming to expect anything to change.
       In “Low Door” we see how the sense of prayer is felt in all his movements. We see as well the way houses and homes are a running theme: the longing for a home, the body as a house:
The speaker is as amazed at his home as he is with his body, subject as they both are to ruin and neglect. In some poems we see his displacement:
Continuing this theme of life and death, of home and the nurturing of the sick, several poems are about plants, both thriving and dying. In “Fountain of Blood” the speaker describes a mess the neighbor has created outside and a plant that has been put into broken-up concrete and “barely-breathing dirt.” “How will it live, in these ruins?” he asks. “How will I?” The making of a home and the life it contains become holy, as in these lines from “Rune for Michael Sick and Far Away”:
The poems are all written from the persona of a gay man infected with HIV. For this reason they feel confessional, the most painful moments and memories recounted as if exactness were a necessity. The humanity is in the specifics. He gives us not generic death, but a specific kind of pain and horror. Often in these poems the speaker is at a bedside, nursing or standing by. “Angels Trumpet” is a particularly beautiful poem:
Though many of the poems in this collection deal with sickness, the pleasures of the body are also the subject of many poems, as in “Prayer After the Baths”:
We see here how even amidst the carnal he is aware of God, and how this awareness seems never to leave him. Moreover, there is a tone of gentle mockery or chiding towards either himself or God, perhaps both. It is because of this light touch that the poems about faith and God are never overwrought.
        Throughout the collection, the speaker works to come to terms with death, the death of people he knows – friends, lovers – and his own, which in many of the poems seems an imminent possibility. Men dead and dying of AIDS haunt the speaker. Hence, the charge to go on living, past others who have died and in the face of one’s own death.
        The poem “Riddle” powerfully tackles the terror and duplicity of AIDS:
In this poem, as with others, we are taken, almost unwillingly, to the most painful places. Strangely though, it is never too much, and Donnelly’s deft hand brings beauty to the unlikeliest subjects, as in “Prayer Over Dust”:
In writing about AIDS, Donnelly joins the likes of Mark Doty, Marie Howe and others whose poems relate their experience of losing someone to this disease. Here, though, we are taken that much closer, into the confidence of a narrator contending with sickness himself, teaching himself in these poems how to live with death on his shoulder.
        An ambitious book, the poems work towards transcendence even as they encounter despair. There is no graver subject, and yet never are the poems oppressive. Patrick Donnelly’s humor and humanity lift these poems up and shine a light in the darkest corners.

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Tara Gorvine received her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and she works as an editor at Edward Elgar Publishing. Tara's poems have appeared in Seattle Review, Cimmaron Review, and Greensboro Review.