THE LIGHTHOUSE

At their best, the poems in Donovan’s third collection suggest a kinship with Mark Strand’s earlier work—spare, haunted, melancholic—most evident in several short nocturnes in the first two sections. “Lie on me, lover. I turn no blankets on the bed. / I make no fire,” he implores in “What of the Night”; “The Body Lights” and “Child” are equally moving and mysterious. Yes, poems about lighthouses abound, and they are distributed “coastally”—at the beginning and end. In “Like Dervishes,” he notes that one resembles “a needle left standing after some ancient race / had threaded sea and land into one garment / but then retreated inland, leaving the final stitch unfinished.” Donovan is a poet of two lands, Ireland and America, and he writes evocatively about having lived in both countries. And, again like Strand, he is capable of considerable humor. He effectively lampoons suburbia in “I Am Going,” “Long Island Rush Hour Report,” and “Weekend”—an easy target, perhaps, but when he hits it, his jaded wit shines: “Arses shift on stools, nodding faces suck coffee, / minds jammed in Sunday neutral and in my ears: / Be one of us and hear no noise.” Appealing as the poems often are, it feels as though Donovan has tried to cram too many of them into this collection. The result is an unfortunate amount of dead weight. He flits from subject to subject over the course of seven sections, one of which (“The Conquerors”), with the exception of a single poem (“You Say”), should have been excised altogether; a section entitled “Ghosts” also impedes the flow.

A frequently strong and varied collection, though its excess of variation proves a liability.