Description
Praise for Transit
In Susan Donnelly’s Transit, astonishments regularly arrive, and common arrangements freakishly derail. Tender and fierce, disinterested and intense, these poems of love, family, and marriage, of Irish immigrants, tyrants, a women’s chain gang, and Rosa Parks, wear the poet’s only, two-faced mask, its mouth turned up and down. Like a well-made rhyme, Transit startles the expectations it satisfies
—Guy Rotella
Susan Donnelly brings readers into the peopled solitude that marks the experiences of characters in these poems. We find the “quiet brother, a camouflaged / gunrunner who passed messages along the deep hedge lanes” in Ireland. We drive across Boston with a young woman in the 1950s, enduring her date, “his moves/so practiced they’re clumsy.” A birthmark turns out to be a map of Massachusetts; a daughter learns that sons are “plowhorses/daughters, the sky-vaulters.” The poems of Transit concern individuals driven and shaped by movement historical, personal and social. Donnelly documents change with an unsentimental eye, showing us family and beloved places in the machinery of Time.
—Robin Becker
Author of The Horse Fair
With elegant understatement, with laconic grace, Susan Donnelly sketches generations and geographies of discovery and loss, happiness and heartbreak. Transit presents the panorama of a broad seascape implied by a handful of uniquely beautiful seashells. I admire greatly this strong experience of spirit.
—Fred Chappell
