Enough! is my first full poetry collection,
published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press on 29th August 2022.
This is a collection of poetry and photography that began hatching 25 years ago.
The 1st 100 orders receive a postcard pack of photographs & poems to bring you closer to my gay Paris.
enough!
for postage in the Republic of Ireland.
€13.80
enough!
for postage outside the Republic of Ireland
€15.80
Memory is mischievous
when it twists past a door
long since shut.
What is it about…
| It’s actually happening, a launch of a collection to close a chapter. It started so long ago that I barely remember who I was, having never really been sketched in any great detail and now, all these years later, suddenly, I can smell the rain again from that first October evening when the coach dropped me off from the airport by the James Joyce pub at Porte Maillot. Paris. I thought I was going to be a famous fashion designer, never did I think at that time that it was all to be days of documenting the development of a love affair and all that happened between and beyond. Enough! is a collection of poetry and photographs split into 6 sections – The Leaning In, The Living, The Loving, The Moving, The Leaning Out and The Leaving. A competition, of sorts, between a boy finding his voice and a city determined not to change. |
The Blurbs…
This finely crafted collection takes us on a personal journey to places of love, leaning, longing, and quickly belonging. Richly evocative poems in and of Paris that twist and turn like the narrow staircases of Haussmannian apartment buildings. Studded with literature, painting and cinema, each poem is a portrait of the city in the changing seasons as the young poet sits and sips, drinking in the people and their promise. Donnelly is a romantic who captures the hope and heat of summer, conveys the losses, the strummed cords now cut, the echoes that could not be contained. A sumptuous book of six sequences that offer a linear narrative of having and holding, of latching on, laying down and letting go. Paris gives lessons in love, glitters and sparkles as the poet makes his way across the Seine, over bridges and on the metro, in pursuit of the other, as the sun sets and rises on the City of Lights. Sensual poems that play with slippage and disappearance, repercussions and illusion, as our protagonist, older now, rummages in Sunday markets of memory, sits looking back on crowded squares of desire.
Paul Stephenson, author of Selfie with Waterlilies www.paulstep.com
Damien Donnelly has alighted on the Irish poetry world like an unignorable force of nature over the last little while. His first collection vividly evokes a Paris in which the ghosts of Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara present the reader with a kind of postmodern tango. Long may Donnelly’s word dance continue.
Kevin Higgins, author of Sex and Death in Merlin Park Hospital, co-creator of Over the Edge
Enough! by Damien B. Donnelly, is a beautiful, lyrical, and rhythmic meditation, a testimony to personal ‘coming-of-age’, a romance and denouncement with startling imagery (the eruptions of desire and anger abound), a Paris of tacky-gaudy tourism, ecstatic desire, philosophical musing and broken love. With its homage/ reference to film, art, architecture, bohemian neighbourhoods, its tropes of Paris and inner-outer geographies, landscapes of self and other situate intricacies of life through memory: its traces, losses, the enjambments of time, place, identity and self-emerging. Via rites of passage, Donnelly’s journeys from Ireland to France, in the spirit of Beckett, Joyce, and other sojourners, is a Barthesian voyage of details through a queering lens, a narrative of the poet’s developing artistic techniques, an invocation to lovers, and a paean to Donnelly’s relationships to art, poetry, the ghosts of history. In rapture, Damien holds the reader’s attention. Raptly. A gem of a collection, ecstatic, dreamy, vibrant and brutal by turns.
Robert Frede Kenter, publisher/EIC of Ice Floe Press, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions, 2021), etc.
The adage ‘happiness paints white’ is disproved in the vibrant, and richly coloured poems of Damien Donnelly – who, with a painter’s eye, offers an exuberant portrait of a life lived fully and with great joy. These are poems that take you to the party, pour you a drink and intoxicate you – they are witty, insightful, highly entertaining and full of compassion, humanity and exhilarating adventures. A writer of great verve and energy, with a deliciously rich and complex voice, reading Damien is a joy. Take a deep breath before diving in!
Anna Saunders, founder/CEO Cheltenham Poetry Festival, author of Communion, Kissing the She Bear, Struck, Burne Jones & the Fox, Ghosting for Beginners and Feverfew.
About Damien B Donnelly
Damien B Donnelly is a 46-year-old Irish, adopted, gay, writer and podcast producer who spent 23 years living in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, working in the fashion industry before returning to Dublin in 2020.
In 2020, his debut chapbook Eat the Storms appeared on the Poetry Book Society Winter List 2020/21 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This was followed by a Stickleback micro collection and a second Pushcart Prize nomination, in Jan 2021, both published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. His short poetry film Dali Distractions was highly commended in the OBheal International Poetry Film Competition 2021.
He produces and hosts the Saboteur Awards (2022) nominated poetry podcast Eat the Storms, now in its 5th season with 350+ international guests on over 12 platforms.
In the Jitterfritz of Neon, a poetry chapbook co-written with Eilin de Paor, was published in Jan 2022.
For his first full collection Enough! he was awarded an Agility Award by the Arts Council, Ireland which enabled him to work with Anna Saunders as his mentor and each collection ordered via the website comes with a small booklet of poetry postcards with his own photographs of Paris.
The Fingal Arts have funded his next collection Back from Away which he hopes will be out in 2023.
His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, online and in print including Bealtaine, The Bangor Literary Journal, Ice Floe Press, York Literary Review and Creative Ireland Poetry Anthology 2022 and his short story appeared in the Harper Collins best-selling anthology A Page from my Life.
He was the first winner of the Holding it Together Apart writing competition run by Dublin City Council, a recipient of a Poetry Town Bursary to stay at the Tyrone Guthrie Retreat in 2021 and the winner of the Balbriggan Poetry Slam as part of the Fingal Poetry Festival 2022.
He recently received another Agility Award 2022 from the Arts Council Ireland and funding from The Fingal Arts to start The Storms, a journal of poetry, prose and visual art and its inaugural issue will be launched August 2022 with Gaynor Kane as guest sub-editor.
Damien B. Donnelly 