Carlene Gadapee’s Review of Patrick Donnelly’s Willow Hammer

Willow Hammer
By Patrick Donnelly
Four Way Books, 2025
86 pp.

Some books feel necessary, both necessary to write and necessary to read. Patrick Donnelly’s Willow Hammer is one of those collections that address difficult and painful subject matter unflinchingly. The poet-speaker of Willow Hammer is present but not prescient; because of this lack of both foresight and insight in his past, the realizations that come with age and maturity become part apology, part apologia, and part mea culpa, not for who he is, but for who he was and could not have been.

The opening sonnet, “Byrd Mass for Four Voices,” signals to the reader that there is conflict involved in trying to resolve the parts of the Self:

I paid to enter the house of Mark, who ran away

naked when Jesus was arrested, and where

I wrestled all night, though not with angels.

The complicated nature of the speaker’s relationship with his mother, who “leaned/ alone, mercy, mercy, onto the loveseat/ in her corduroy caftan covered with strawberries—” and listened to Stravinsky with her ten-year-old son, and his sister, who, as the narratives unfold, suffered at the hands of his mother’s ex-convict husband, is revealed detail after painful detail throughout the collection of poems. However, this collection also confirms for both the poet-speaker and the reader “why we are here—“; we are supposed to witness with compassion our former, seeking Selves and to honor the emerging Self as well, as in the poem “Travelogue,” in which “we have to pay close attention/ to keep the long truck above the speed/ that makes us shake,” and “Everything is in the truck. Your parents and mine. / The road built for us by those who/ bombed the rock to make the rough places plain.” While this poem is, on the surface, about a road trip, it is also a powerful metaphor for the idea of becoming.

The collection shifts to a very serious tone in the next set of poems. They speak to awful and awe-ful truths, using language, as imperfect as it is, to give us permission to speak the unspeakable. How do we communicate the things that, when spoken aloud, can’t be hidden again? The poem “Willow flower” begins with “You know how you can know some things/ but forget you know until it’s time to remember.” This is the heart of Willow Hammer as a collection: it is an unravelling of experience and memory to get to the pain, and the poet-speaker knows that the pain will be amplified by acknowledgement—but it must, finally, be spoken about. The mother marries Billy, a man who “had looks and strength, a crewcut and a drawl,” the sister was “a teenage votress of chaste Diana.” The new husband is a predator: “and Mom said if it happened/ my sister should have run faster or changed into a tree.” The poet-speaker was away at seminary, and he had no way of knowing first-hand what tragedy had struck at home. He didn’t find out for twenty years. What do we do with information that fractures us, and we can’t affect or fix the damage?

Donnelly’s deft handling of the personal and universal tragedy of rape is profound. He turns to mythology as a vehicle to carry the reader on the path of terrible discovery and to discuss the horror; the speaker’s not being present and not witnessing first-hand the destruction that the violence causes makes it somehow both more terrible and mythic at the same time. Donnelly turns to Murasaki, the legendary Japanese author and lady-in-waiting from the 11th century who wrote The Tale of Genji. In the poem, “The Tale of Murasaki,” there is a collision of mythic figures and contemporary violence: “Murasaki’s mom was cashiering/ at the truck stop” and Genji goes to the house where Murasaki is alone. She flees, but is caught, and sexual violence is the result.

Other poems in Willow Hammer also explore the nature of sexual violence, of buried truth, and the damage that results: “When my sister and I talk now/ it’s to compare what we can’t remember. // For instance, each other. /…Where was everyone.” This is the central question that the entire collection circles around; where are we when horrible things happen? Why were we not there? What can we do about it, if anything? Except, maybe, write about it, over and over again, opening and manifesting the pain.

In the poem “Could the poem be in English,” Donnelly speaks to the idea that sometimes blurting truth is both imperative and scary: “But consider, this speaker may be trying/ to cajole the reader to ask what kind of person,//…blurts some English out,// then runs away, unable to stay in a relationship/ with other people’s pain, in the vulgar// language common to them all…”—but he does. This poet-speaker immerses himself in the pain in order to figure it out, to find the root causes, and to grapple with the truth. The poem’s concluding couplet is the focus of the entire collection:

Don’t pretend your comforts are more defensible.

Don’t pretend your weakness is easier to forgive.

The next several poems feature the character, Billy, and the strange almost-obsession that the speaker has with the man’s past, his present, his tattoos. The fascination and the disgust are palpable, and the poet-speaker muses, “If I were a wizard, / would it be better to bind him/ or disperse him.” In the poem “Last car,” the verifiable details of the speaker’s sister’s birth date, Billy’s death, and the speaker’s mother’s death, and the make and model of her last car are shared, and “This book tells the rest.” Facts don’t tell the entire story; only art— these poems—can.

This particular poem, however, is not the last we hear of the tragedy. In the small poem “Questionnaire,” the speaker confronts their “real dad” about his role, or lack thereof, in protecting his sister. It’s starkly clear in this poem not only about the microcosm of families, but also the macrocosm of how the world disregards violence against girls and women. The father simply states, “That’s just life. I shot somebody in Korea.” The reader must stop to wonder whether people are so immersed in their own carried pain that they can’t prevent or protect their own families? Or do they just not care? The next poem, “Should there be a statute of limitation?” compels the reader to consider, too, the question of when is it okay to speak out? And when—if—we do, when should we stop speaking? The poem “Here is a curated list of rapes in Ovid” recounts a lengthy list of sexual violations in poetry from antiquity, and Donnelly ends it with a common response from far too many people. It serves as an indictment: “Why dredge up the past? For once/ can’t we just have some peace and quiet?”

Why, indeed? The paired poem “Ilico” and “Now” (first in Latin, then in English) tells us why. The poet-speaker remembers his little sister as she once was, a “little willow of glass/ upon whom he laid/ his hammer hands.” When I read this poem, I had to stop and close the book for a while. My heart hurt for the characters, and even more so for every girl, every woman, every witness to this cycle of tragedy that is a plague on humanity. A world that turns away from this violence, the collection suggests, is broken, and hiding from the knowledge is not acceptable, nor should it be possible.

The collection ends with a lovely, mystical poem in four parts titled “Four Waters.” Water is both destructive and life-sustaining, and the four parts to this poem make it clear that memories can be—and are—both myth and wonder. In each section, the number thirteen is featured; the author’s note tells us that “no matter how old [he gets], when [he thinks] of the age [he feels] inside, it’s always about thirteen.” The poem itself is a wonderful example of controlled pathos, combining elements of haiku and haibun, free verse and prose, letting the chosen form fit the emotion. As Wordsworth famously said about poetry, it should be “emotion recollected in tranquility.” In this poem, the reader senses that a measure of acceptance and peace can be found:

Thirteen, I drank spring water

from a grassy pool the Pilgrims knew

and the woods were full of ferns and fog.

Poet and teacher Carlene M. Gadapee lives in northern New Hampshire with her husband, several fruit trees, and a beehive. She holds two Masters’ Degrees (MEd and MA-LS). She can be found on Facebook as Carlene M Gadapee, on Instagram at @carlenegadapee, and on BlueSky at @carlenemgadapee. Carlene M. Gadapee’s chapbook, What to Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2025), joins her poems and book reviews in many journals including Allium, Smoky Quartz, Touchstone, Gyroscope Review, Vox Populi, and MicroLit.