Obit: Michael Donaghy

Subject: RE: Obit: Michael Donaghy
From: Anglo
Date: 01 Oct 04 - 03:40 PM

[The obit posted above is basically extracted from the Guardian, but without some vital statistics. This one was posted Here. ]
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Vale Michael Donaghy

Arts Hub
Tuesday, September 28, 2004

The death has occurred of poet Michael Donaghy, at the all too young age of 50. A New Yorker of Irish extraction, Donaghy had made London his home for almost 20 years. He died on 16 September following a brain haemorrhage.
News of Donaghy's death has shocked the literary community. A highly acclaimed poet and musician, his poetry has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
An edition of the Penguin Modern Poets series placed Donaghy alongside Andrew Motion and Hugo Williams.
His poetry has been described as 'passionate and elegant'. His first collection, Slivers was published in 1985, following a six-year editorship of the Chicago Review.
Shibboleth (1988) won both the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. Errata (1993) was selected for promotion as a 'New Generation Poet'.
Wallflowers, 'a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling' (available from the Poetry Society) was the essay resulting from his post as Creative Reader in Residence for the Society in 1999. It is considered to be one of the wittiest treatises on the meaning of poetry in recent times.
Conjure (2000) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year and was short-listed for the Whitbread and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. 2000 also saw the publication of a retrospective collection, Dances Learned Last Night covering the 20 years from 1975.
A fine musician of the Irish traditional school, Donaghy founded Samradh Music in Chigaco and was in the early line-up of Lammas. He moved to London in 1985 to join his partner Maddy Paxman, a fellow musician. Their son, Ruairi, was born in 1996.
Although the funeral was a private family one, a memorial service is being planned for the many who will wish to celebrate the life of such a talented man. His warmth and personal charm endeared him to many in the literary and musical worlds and beyond.
Maddy Paxman can be contacted through Michael's Publisher, Picador, or via Gerry Wardle at TriplePA, 15 Connaught Gardens, Forest Hall, Newcastle, NE12 8AT. All cards, letters and messages will be forwarded to her.
A trust fund has been set up for their son, Ruairi. Contributions can be sent:
c/o Roslyn Cassidy
Green Endings
141 Fortess Road
London NW5 2HR
Cheques should be made payable to "Green Endings" and a notes attached saying 'In memory of Michael Donaghy'. Roslyn will keep a record and pass this on to Maddy.
The date and venue for the memorial service will be announced shortly.

Exile's End
You will do the very last thing.
Wait then for a noise in the chest,
between depth charge and gong,
like the seadoors slamming on the car deck.
Wait for the white noise and then cold astern.
Gaze down over the rim of the enormous lamp.
Observe the skilled frenzy of the physicians,
a nurse's bald patch, blood. These will blur,
as sure as you've forgotten the voices
of your childhood friends, or your toys.
Or, you may note with mild surprise,
your name. For the face they now cover
is a stranger's and it always has been.
Turn away. We commend you to the light,
Where all reliable accounts conclude.

Michael Donaghy (24 May 1954-16 September 2004)

Subject: RE: Obit: Michael Donaghy
From: GUEST,Chris B (Born Again Scouser)
Date: 01 Oct 04 - 06:42 AM

I don't actually care what Joe Offer thinks. Mike Donaghy was a mate of mine and I hadn't actually heard about his death until I saw this thread.

I first met Mike in Chicago in the early 1980s when he was playing with an Irish band called Samhradh. Good band, as it happens. We lost touch for several years then he called me again a few years ago to play a few gigs with him in North London. One of the most enjoyable St. Patrick's night gigs I ever played was at Redditch Public Library in 1997 with the two of us playing some tunes and him reading some of his poetry in between.

I spoke to him a few weeks ago and we discussed the possibility of him coming up for the Liverpool Irish Festival. I was really looking forward to seeing him again.

Such a nice bloke.

Damn.

Subject: RE: Obit: Michael Donaghy
From: Joe Offer
Date: 30 Sep 04 - 07:54 PM

OK, Gargoyle, this one has something to do with music. But why flood us with all these obits at once? Makes a person wonder what you're up to now...
Generally, a thread should be used to generate a discussion, which means it should relate to something else. Disconnected information that gets dumped here disappears in a day.
So, yeah, I'd like to hear more about Michael - but the obit dumping looks suspicious. I think I counted five obituary threads started in less than 45 minutes.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: Obit: Michael Donaghy
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Sep 04 - 07:48 PM

Throw this one to the bottom, ya little clone-bones and discover the meaning of an Irish Rebellion!!!

Michael Donaghy

Gifted practitioner of poetry and Irish traditional music.

A figure in the generation of poets who emerged in the 1980s, as well as an Irish traditional musician of repute.
Donaghy was born into an Irish family but did not follow their traditions. In 1985, he moved to London to join his partner and fellow musician Maddy Paxman, whom he married in 2003.

He also continued to play in various Irish music groups, as well as the early line-up of Lammas,

His gift for dramatic immediacy, and his crossing of mandarin and vernacular language, enabled his work to avoid the academicism that sometimes afflicts the recent generation of American so-called new formalists, with whom he was never truly aligned.

A beguiling playfulness serves to emphasise the depths of anxiety and melancholia over which Donaghy's superb ear leads us - feelings perhaps rooted in Catholicism. He retains the Catholic sense of scale and labyrinthine ingenuity; in City Of God, a mad, failed priest, obsessed with the medieval memory arts, believes "the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind/ could find the secret order of the world/ and remember every drop on every face/ in every summer thunderstorm."

Later, in the shocking Black Ice And Rain, from Conjure, even the consolations of such an imagined order are removed, as the narrator pitilessly passes on his dreadful tale of friendship and catastrophe to an unsuspecting party guest.

The birth, in 1996, of their son Ruairi was a great joy to Maddy and Michael. Michael was a devoted father,

A particular highlight was his rendering of Keats's Ode To Melancholy ("No, no, go not to Lethe"), which threw a bridge across the division between poetry on the page and in performance, without sacrificing an iota of seriousness. Poetry in recent times has had few finer advocates or practitioners. He will come to be seen as one of the representative poets of the age.