Start with the TroubleThe speaker of Daniel Donaghy’s Start with the Trouble is trying to bury his past under newness, to “fly open and free” from his memories of a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood. The beauty of his poems is in their awareness of the difficulty of such a project, in the way they recognize no “clear line between trouble and no trouble.” The book’s landscape of injury, disappearance and accidental death manifests itself in a series of extremely personal memories, through which the author draws a map of his own past. Start with the Trouble follows the trajectory of his thoughts as they reverse into a world that refuses to be forgotten – a world full of expectedly difficult relationships and empty promises. Donaghy handles his material honestly, if at times too ingenuously, in metaphors that occasionally limit meaning more than they let it grow. But Donaghy’s goal is simple and direct. He wants to end his book with possibilities expanding from the page – with the promise of a new future in the shape of his young daughter. Expanding the possibilities of his language would have helped the book move further in this direction, but the power of the personal voice sustains it well.
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