This is what James Wright called "the poetry of a grown man," engaged by the world and responsive to it. John Donoghue is seeker and a mensch, right down there with us in gritty daily life. His forty-eight free-verse sort-of-sonnets are like turns of a kaleidoscope pointed at memory, mortality, morality, and love, rearranging these great, inexhaustible subjects into surprising, personal configurations. If too many poems seem to you to have too many words about too little substance, here are some that will refresh vour faith that poetry can best express the exhilarating strangeness of being alive for a while on this earth. -- Michael Ryan