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Start
with the Trouble
Poems by Daniel Donaghy
Beauty rises from the darkness
in this second collection
“Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted
book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an
‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories
of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school,
get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the
end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot
through with loss and, finally, redemption.”
—Kim Addonizio, author of Ordinary Genius
“Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where
hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex
illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t
find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the
only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is
not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those
who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no
choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking
any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you
by the collar and compel you to listen.”
—Jim Daniels, author of Revolt of the Crash-Test
Dummies
“Dan Donaghy could have been a stonecutter, but he chose
to work something harder. Amazing, in these finely sculpted
poems, how beautiful trouble and loss and pain can be, how
excruciatingly pleasureable. We begin, and so often end, in
trouble, a fact these poems do not deny. But, still, Donaghy
tells us, trouble is not all we have.”
—Jake Adam York, author of A Murmuration of Starlings
“Poem after poem offers the consolation of a thoughtful
human spirit who struggles with the blackness and is not broken.
Never peripheral to human experience, Donaghy’s poems,
centered in the heart, teach us to preserve.”
—Vivian Shipley, author of Hardboot: New and Old
Poems
In his
second collection of poems, Daniel Donaghy uses the power
of poetry to connect the Kensington section of Philadelphia
he knew as a boy––a place replete with crime,
poverty, fractured families, and various other kinds of darkness––to
upstate New York’s woods, rural Connecticut’s
town greens and small churches, Vancouver’s back alleys,
the killing ground of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa
County, Colorado, and the shores of ancient Greece. In doing
so, he examines the relationship between memory and identity
and strives to give voice to those who might otherwise be
forgotten by history.
Start with the Trouble is the place of fist fights
and first kisses, where we sit beside the dying and where
we sing to those not yet born. It is where Michelangelo’s
Pieta recreates itself on a Kensington sidewalk, where a mother
watches helplessly as two older boys dangle her son from the
roof of a building, where a prostitute writes poems between
tricks before she disappears without a trace. It is where
Bruce Springsteen goes back in time to woo Circe and the Sirens,
where a father returns from the dead in the voice of Babe
Ruth, where a mother’s spirit rises from the shadows
of spruce trees, where Santa forsakes his reindeer and slides
into town behind sled dogs. It is where simple gestures such
as opening a car trunk or loading a wheelbarrow become portals
into faraway, nightmarish worlds in which the young are forced
to bear too much witness to the world.
Start with the Trouble is a place where beauty exists
amidst every kind of ugliness, and where that beauty is made
even more precious because of the depths from which it rises.
Daniel Donaghy was raised in Philadelphia
and is the author of Streetfighting, a Paterson Poetry
Prize finalist. He is assistant professor of English at Eastern
Connecticut State University and has received artist grants
from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and
the Constance Saltonstall Foundation.
September
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 80 pages
$16.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-907-0 | 1-55728-907-7
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