Thinking of the "tragic generation" of the 1890's, William Butler Yeats took a phrase from Stéphane Mallarmé as the title for the second volume of his Autobiography, "The Trembling of the Veil": "I have found in an old diary a saying from Stéphane Mallarmé, that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title."

"The Trembling of the Veil" might be an apt title for the confused and apocalyptic 1990's as we near the zero point of the Millennium. Apocalyptic rage is all around us.

Joseph Donahue's fascinating, compelling long poem, Terra Lucida, partakes of that rage. Donahue's title is a play upon the mapmaker's phrase, "terra incognita": unknown land, unknown territory. In a sense, the title is the opposite of the mapmaker's phrase. "Lucida" = "shining, bright, clear; lucid, clear." An English version of the phrase appears on the first page as the poet's consciousness sweeps across "coast, range, ridge, pit / then black dazzle & galaxies of white smoke": "Visible earth." Yet "darkness" is an issue of this poem, too. On the concluding page Donahue cries out: "Undulant dark, / dissolve me..." Yet even here light appears:

At the opening of your show
a slipped whisper, a truth—

The world began as
a snapshot, a desert at noon—

more light there, you say
than the air knows

what to
do with...

The artist whose "show" Donahue attends is evoking Genesis. One thinks: Fiat Lux, "Let there be light." Yet the phrase "Mehr licht," "more light," is the last thing Goethe said before he died. Donahue's title is not ironic (I've written "light" but understand that I really mean "dark") but complex, opening out into the "terra," the "place" of consciousness, which is in fact no place. "The high places are a last glow / over the low green where the two lakes / billow," he writes, echoing -ow sounds. Terra Lucida is partly about the enormous crisis of descriptive writing. Donahue is always telling us about things and places, describing them:

An iridescence
A riverbank

A black jag as the air
breaks into pure altitude...

*

Glacial range
of harbor rock-salt—

*

Padlocked beach arcades
Homes nailed shut

yet the moment he describes them they turn into psychic material, metaphor, and "Nothing arcs back / person, place, or word." The very language by which the poet names the "Visible earth" also deprives it of its material substantiality. The phrase "Visible earth" is echoed late in the poem:

the visible world ceasing to be,

our agonies a glimmer
on the failing peak

Creation is
ending—

the night of the
spirit draws near—

The beginning of Section XII quotes Simone Weil: "We must root ourselves in the absence of place."

Terra Lucida abounds in what Swedenborg and, later, Baudelaire called "correspondences." The personal, an unsatisfactory love affair with a woman who is probably the artist whose "show" the poet attends at the conclusion, appears to be part of it: "That time at the party, you caught my arm...tumult of black hair, bare shoulder...." Yet personal anguish immediately conjures up cosmic anguish, "the night of the / spirit," even the presence of Satan, "the one who saw / Creation and refused it / hovering close." Genesis and the Fall haunt everything: "Let cold pour from this glacial / lip into the life of cities." The possibly deceptive presence of "joy" is here too:

Grieving fades & now
a thought wells

a pulse of air,
An entangling

joy, nothing
can stop it—

But the line break at "nothing" is important as well. "Joy" may indeed be "nothing." It may also be the case that the "agonies" of the poem are the condition of new life, of the birth of the god:

Some say awaken, O king asleep in the stone,
Some say the scriptures are blank.

Some say these years are the minutes of the final hour
Some say come, greater life, break us to bits...

Some say a dawn deep in winter, a black curtain rising

*

in New England, in the
season of the birth of god—

the word death
descending—

Terra Lucida is a powerful confrontation with end-of-the-century dawn-of-the- millennium angst. It is reminiscent at times of the early Eliot. It suggests also Ivan Argüelles' recently published "Dead" (in New Poetry from California: Dead / Requiem). For Donahue, as for Eliot and Argüelles, the "personal" or the "confessional" is precisely the site of connection to the "cosmic," the "place" at which one's life explodes into myth. Reading Donahue, I thought of still another passage from Yeats' Autobiography:

Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as completely organised, even as unique, as the images that pass before the mind between sleeping and waking.

In Terra Lucida the poet endeavors to turn himself into a "place," a "terra lucida," in which the divine may "happen." The stance is finally one of waiting. The powerful "Some say" section ends bleakly: "In the melee that / ensues all of them die." Yet the beloved's speech is also a "saying" ("you," not the indefinite "some"), and it is clearly hopeful, though still "dark." Note the verb "places" and the enigmatic, tantalizing word, "there":

The hours are stars at the
boundaries, you say...

Botticelli places the lovers
at the circle's center, you say...

more light there, you say
than the air knows

what to
do with...

Jack Foley