Michael Donaghy: Safest.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Michael Donaghy Safest. Picador UK, 47 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling]

When the poet Michael Donaghy died in 2004 at the age of fifty, he left behind three slim volumes of poetry and a computer file called "Safest" containing the poems in this posthumous collection. Born in the Bronx, Donaghy moved in 1985 to London, where he became associated with the New Generation of British poets--a distinguished roster of Young Turks that includes Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, and others. Though his early death will likely occlude the fact, Donaghy was perhaps the finest of the bunch.

His poems adhere in memory the way all durable poems do, phrase by phrase, line by line, until one has succumbed completely to their spell. And "spell" is the mot juste for Donaghy: his poems are musical utterances (almost incantations at times) meant to ward off dread and the pain of loss. A poet only needs a handful of first-rate poems to stake a claim for posterity, and Donaghy had more than his share: "Machines" "Black Ice and Rain" "Haunts," "Caliban's Books," and others.

This book is, therefore, both a welcome and a melancholy event: one is grateful for the new poems but saddened to note that, aside from a few drawer ...