Thunder Moon by Donna O’Connell-Gilmore

These poems made me gasp. O’Connell-Gilmore plumbs the verb-pool to find the perfect words, refashions elements of old language into something new, shocks us with fresh images. That’s quite a feat: to create fresh language. But that is exactly what she does as she juxtaposes the ordinary with the extraordinary, the spare with the lush. In these poems, simple holds hands with the intricate. Tame twines with the wild … exotic with the familiar … the ugly with the truly gorgeous. O’Connell is a very fine poet. Her Thunder Moon shines.

–Lauren Wolk, artist, poet, and New York Times bestselling author of Wolf Hollow, Beyond the Bright Sea, Those Who Favor Fire

In Donna O’Connell-Gilmore‘s poems, the exterior landscape bridges itself into the interiorities of her speakers. As we see in Thunder Moon, O’Connell is deeply in tune with the world around her, from the storytelling of her husband’s snoring to the notes of an apple tree’s oriole to the scuttling mice of her attic. The precision of the author’s natural world functions on multiple levels, whether to highlight female agency or to celebrate human sexuality.  These poems, then, in the tradition of Wordsworth, use our landscapes to better understand our complex human connections: the brokenness of a marriage falling apart, the censoring of our teenage sexuality, the need for intimacy in the he-dove song. Open this collection and let O’Connell sing for you, Coo-ah-cooo-cooo-coo!

–John Bonanni editor Cape Cod Poetry Review

Donna O’Connell-Gilmore’s poems are about Nature and human relationships and where they meet. She is a skilled observer, and deft colorist. Her poems are both vivid and acute. O’Connell-Gilmore is more of a Precisionist than an Impressionist, though the poems linger and haunt. She can raise our powers of observation, or expand our critical faculties, but the soul never improves and always bleeds through. Even with difficult and unpleasant material description is praise, if only for the possibilities of language. O’Connell-Gilmore’s poems are startling and brave.

–Keith Althhus, poet, author of Rival Heaves and Ladder of Hours