Eagle Pond Authors’ Series Presents: A Reading and Book-signing with Patrick Donnelly

Frost Place Poetry Seminar Director, poet and translator Patrick Donnelly will read from his poetry collections Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge, as well as from newer work. From the sexual abandon of the 1980s gay demimonde, to a New England mill town whose mill has closed, to a mother’s decline into mental illness, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin describes hurt places and people in order to also describe the knowledge and the spirit that comes after loss, the song that responds to the darkest predicaments. Ilya Kaminsky praises Little-Known Operas as “a Gospel According to Patrick Donnelly, a book of revelations of what it means to be human, to be hurt, to be awed, to be stunned by our world—and to find love late in life. It is a book of tenderness towards everyone who’s been in pain, everyone who’s been ill, everyone who’s had a mother, loved music, everyone who’s lived on this third planet from the sun.” 

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). About Donnelly, Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Donnelly regards his writing as “activist” in the sense that it insists on the subtle links between body and spirit, treats same-sex love as equivalent to all other love and desire, and interrogates topics like the AIDS epidemic with lyric strategies.Website: www.patrickdonnellypoetry.com

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