Katy, sorry, didn't mean to make you a straw man there - of course you don't think Donaghy pulled stuff off for the sake of it. You said it best yourself: he seemed to be moving toward joy. And there's a certain joy in doing really hard things and making them seem effortless. Isn't that one of the things we all like about Richard Wilbur?
I also really like what you said about learning de Man from "The Palm." Yes, I've learned a lot from Donaghy, on a number of topics. Of course, I always take those things with a shakerful of salt (as in his notoriously invented Welsh poet) but for every one of those, there are a dozen
Claude glasses.
But back to those pears. I'd like to revise my remarks a little. "The Palm" works, I think, even if you know zilcho about Django Reinhardt and Paul de Man. You probably do have to have, though, at least an intuitive sense of the tension between "theory and praxis" (ha), or at least that poets and critics sometimes don't get along. You have to know what France was in 1942. Katy, I suspect I was your mirror image here: I came to this poem knowing the Paul de Man story but pretty fuzzy about Django Reinhardt, who I got to know only after the poem prompted me to. The really wonderful thing is how the poem (really, all of Donaghy's work as far as I know it) just keeps coming together more and more, the more you know about whatever arcane topic he's writing about.
And of course, lots of times there's nothing arcane about it, or he simply gives you everything you need in the poem. I'm away from my book at the moment, but what's the name of that wonderful poem about the failed candidate for priesthood with the remembering problem? The one with the "cathedral inside the cathedral" in his head? That's a good example of Donaghy clearing the way for the reader entirely, and it's just wonderful storytelling.
I think that's really the thing that sets Donaghy apart from so many contemporaries: storytelling. He's always wanting to tell you a story, to have your attention and then
do something with it, something delightful. It's intensely generous.