Jasmine Donahaye

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Biographical note:  Jasmine Donahaye has published poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and scholarship. Her first collection, Misappropriations, was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh first collection prize in 2006, and her monograph The Wales-Israel Tradition will be published in 2010 by the University of Wales Press.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714599
ISBN:  9781844714599
Author:  Jasmine Donahaye
Title:  Self-Portrait as Ruth
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-09
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  4 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Self-portrait as Ruth deals in provocatively sexual and erotic terms with the Israel-Palestine situation. Relentlessly topical, contested and challenging in subject matter, the poems explore individual and collective guilt, longing and loss with sometimes shocking juxtapositions. A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate.

Main description:  Self-Portrait as Ruth is a provocative collection exploring the subject of Israel-Palestine in sharp, accessible poems that eschew the conventional language or orientation of either Zionist or Palestinian solidarity. Rooted in a Jewish family history that reaches into nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, Self-Portrait as Ruth is written in defiance of all ‘official’ versions of Israeli or Palestinian history. Polemical in places, the densely, painfully political subject matter is humanised throughout by a weaving together of individual and community, family and tribe, lover and self, nation and landscape. These poems are interrogations of the first person possessive – of claims, both singular and plural, to land, to identity, to history, and to the body – and of wounds and victimisation, both unique and collective.

The subject matter is relentlessly topical and contested, whether focusing on the Palestinian story of catastrophe explored here in the lyrical love-poem Palestina, or on questions of Jewish guilt, investigated to forensic extent in poems such as My Father’s Circumcision, with its ‘innocent’ circumciser who, ‘with his ragged nail/tears the foreskin’ and ‘bends his head to suck the wound’, and in the short poem Fetishes, which juxtaposes anal sex and masturbation with perhaps the world’s most contentious place: the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. The concluding question, ‘how can you be sure the bloodprice that you paid will be enough?’ takes the moral interrogation of this collection beyond the topical matter of Israel-Palestine to universal issues of guilt and accountability.

A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate, making uncomfortable reading for partisans and non-partisans alike.

Table of contents:
Self-portrait as Ruth
Thirst
Palestina
Fetishes
Sheba before Solomon
Israel v. Palestine?:?a sonnet
The seamline
Harry Potter goes on sale in the Beit She’an valley
Water
Gaza, summer 2006
The bus to Ramallah
Cynhaeaf
Fragments
Stillbirth
My father’s circumcision
Pheasants
The civic centre, Tel Aviv
Lachshon hora
A stoning
Jerusalem performing
The Palestine or orange-tufted sunbird
Belongings
Gaza closed
Migrants
An inquisition
Remembering Baba Yaga
The Jewish Golden Age
The border, 1947
Storytelling
To a man approaching middle age
A kind of tikkun
Elijah’s return
An angel is passing

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Excerpt from book:  

The bus to Ramallah

I asked if his bus went to the Old City
but he clicked his tongue, jerked his chin
and drove on. I walked,
I walked till my heels split
and I was late, rushing to the bus station
at the Damascus Gate.

Among shishlik sellers and plastic kitchenware,
I asked a driver about to leave where
is the bus to Ramallah? He smiled, pointed,
and as I came to the stained cement bench
three men gestured to me to sit; three men called
when the bus arrived: here, here, you wanted
Ramallah, and the driver smiled and said welcome.

I saw, in my hurry, I’d put my shirt on inside out
and now, among men, I could not put myself right.
I hardly saw East Jerusalem, Qalandia —
I leaned my face against the smeared glass and wept,
because surely nothing was worth it costing this:
that we’ve lost what it means, welcome,
baruch ha’ba, a blessing that you’ve come.

Unpublished endorsement:  Jasmine Donahaye’s existential quest takes many routes that lead to arresting poems, the best of which catch you by the throat.

Dannie Abse

Previous review quote:  Less an expression of diasporic and exilic experience than a meditation on the stark problematics of homecoming… Her poems chill with their fidelity to the unhinging problematics of the cloven map of the world, of language and inner space…. Donahaye, exiled in language, calls us to contemplate a bitter heritage…. At the heart of her poetic world, even in its revelation of beauty, lies an intimation of violence and menace…. This is a poet whose intellectual and questing mind sets all experience in the long and bloodstained view from Pisgah.

Stevie Davies
Planet

Previous review quote:  This book is adventurous in its view of boundaries, whether personal or national, as arbitrary appropriations … a debut that launches itself fearlessly into physical experience as a site of danger and discovery.

Zoë Skoulding
Poetry Wales

Previous review quote:  The delight is in how Donahaye achieves the near impossible here, creating an erotic bittersweet evocation while reining back from the merely crude or potentially obscene …

Kathryn Gray
New Welsh Review

Previous review quote:  Donahaye’s poetry is not for the faint-hearted…. “Sexually frank”…. cannot prepare the reader for her explicit descriptions of birth and post-natal depression…. Misappropriations reads like an autopsy report for modern intimacy. Donahaye’s narrators are forced to consider their status as human beings: physically united by circumstance, they maintain tenuous relationships in the world of words: man and woman, mother and child, Palestinian and Israeli, pressed up against each other in reluctant society.

Patrick McFarlane
Poetry Matters

Previous review quote:  [The poems] are rivetingly dramatic, full of vivid scene painting and weighty, fully visualized walk-on characters… Donahaye writes only in packed yet economical free verse, as if in her the Hemingway of the sketches in In Our Time had melded with the concerns and fervor of, say, Sharon Olds.

Ray Olson
Booklist