Willow Hammer is a consummate lyric of the aftermath. In his fifth book, Patrick Donnelly has his face pressed against the eyepiece as he looks directly at the past, collecting poems that fan out kaleidoscopically from a buried memory — a crime one family member committed upon another.
Upon learning that his stepfather assaulted his sister, Donnelly traces the consequences of ignorance, denial, bargaining, complicity, and finally revelation that reverberated through his and his loved ones' lives for five decades after the abuse. The knowledge of this catalyzing violation not only recontextualizes the siblings' shared history but inflects the present as Donnelly revisits the development of his own sexuality, remembers his escape from home into academia, and recognizes analogues of his sister's abuse in the literary canon. Singing a Byrd Mass after a night at the bathhouse, the poet characterizes the tenor and bass as "two wrestling saints," "lowest of the four voices— / once I thought I saw them kiss each other's faces." Or, presenting The Tale of Genji from a young bride's perspective, Donnelly depicts Murasaki — who "fled out the back" of her own home and "hid in the scented hollow of a juniper" — as his sister might have been at 14.
And that — recovering glimpses of his sister's unknowable interiority, reckoning with the unbearable but necessary truth — is this book's difficult and endless work. In the wake of a particular kind of harm, Willow Hammer seems to suggest, justice is a disingenuous concept — but that doesn't preclude acknowledgement and healing. "Now" documents the poet's arrival at this compromise: "I remember my / little sister that was, / little willow of glass / upon whom he laid / his hammer hands." There is no revocation of the hands, but the radical possibilities of Donnelly's lyrics refuse to let their shadow obscure his sister's memory.
