Vellum, the exquisite debut collection from Matt Donovan, meditates on beauty, art, and the violence that is sometimes inherent in both. Here, he juxtaposes religious iconography with stories from history, biography, and personal narrative. In the poignant "Saint Catherine in an O," a knife bears unlikely duality--an object stirring with danger and grace. "A man plays slide guitar / with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs--/ one about light, the Lord moving on water . . . / how blood, he knows, will make him whole." In other poems, he reflects upon master artists, who captured similar themes in their art though in different mediums. Brimming with poems that are quietly powerful, Vellum marks the arrival of a commanding new voice.

"Ornate elements from European art and bruised blue-collar lives from middle America (Toledo, New Mexico, Trenton, and elsewhere) form the poles around which Donovan's lyrical debut revolves. 'There's something to be said for the pattern ruin makes,' he explains, and his own patterns combine ruin and splendor in the manner of great mosaics, with dozens of noun phrases, lists, memorable names of things, adjacent and conjoined in his long unrhymed lines. 'A Blues About Wanting in the End' finds, in a tree destroyed by beetles, all manner of elegy and suffering: 'the wood honeycombed, scar-sprawled & furrowed;/ the tangle of channels where the larvae have hatched.' 'An East Toledo Map of Ash' includes 'pastel plastic hangers,// cans, a punctured hose, a framed sketch of orchids streaming from black grass,// black bags cinched with twine.' Another poem begins with an epigraph from a medieval historian, and ends in northern New Mexico, where the poet lives now, and where he finds sources of 'joy: knitted V-neck cardigans; coyote fence posts// looped with wire; a pair of work boots snared in the telephone lines.' Chosen for publication by Mark Doty (who contributes a foreword), Donovan's detail-packed, even bejeweled poems resemble, in spots, those of Amy Clampitt and Albert Goldbarth. Though Donovan's odes may not find the formal complexities of the former, nor the comic variety of the latter, the sheer vigor of his noticings could make him a poet to watch." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Matt Donovan is the winner of the 2006 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry, selected by Mark Doty and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Donovan's poems have appeared in several journals, including Poetry, Agni, the Gettysburg Review, and the Kenyon Review. He received his MFA from New York University and in 2004 was awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the College of Santa Fe and lives in New Mexico with his wife and son.

Foreword ix

Part I

Pulling Down the Sky 3

Saint Catherine in an O: A Song About Knives 4

Montezuma's Painters 6

Small Blessing for a Child 8

Fumbling with a Field Guide on the Back Arroyo Trail 9

Charlie Chaplin Dug Up and Ransomed: A Prayer 11

Second Pilgrimage, Rodeo Nites 12

Line 14

Those Two Sketches by Severn in Italy 15

Part II

A Partial Invocation of Our Days 19

Night Train: A Listener's Guide 21

The Keeper of Hands 23

Portrait of the Whirlwind in Job as a Passenger Pigeon Flock 25

The Scabbard of Limbs Means Flesh 26

An East Toledo Map of Ash 29

Thumb Trick 31

Licking the El Greco 34

A Blues About Wanting in the End 35

What I Mean When I Say Blossom 38

Part III

Shapes of Stone and Prayer 43

Trenton, a Solmization, Two Rivers, a Few Tells 45

Patio Lull with House Guest and View 48

Swallowed Things 50

To a Student Who Refuses to Read More of The Inferno After Learning

None of It Is True 52

A Damaged Fresco of The Massacre of the Innocents 54

Audubon Diptych 56

Towards the Sound of a Heron Stepping on Ice 59

Notes 66

Acknowledgments 67