Excerpt from The Hudson Review, Spring 2007

John Menaghan has published one of the best books of 2006. She Alone is a sort of novel in verse or fictional biography, but neither of those terms quite does it justice. It evokes the life of a woman artist in fifty-odd lyrics, each in a different form, each handled with unobtrusive panache. Here is a book in which style and substance harmonize. It is refreshingly devoted not to the poet’s career but to another life—and an eloquent one at that. Some poems are expansive, others minimalist, but the book comes closer to the tone and tenor of Beckett (with its unsettling reverberations) than anything by Mark Strand. The following lyric, “What She Wanted,” arrives late in the book:

She wanted to paint
and she has painted
but too little.
She wanted to wander
and she has wandered
but too little.
She wanted to dream
and she has dreamed
but too little.
She wanted to love & be loved
and she has loved & been loved
but too little.
She wanted to live
and she has lived
but too little.
She never wanted to die
yet she has died
little by little.

Published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland and available from Dufour Editions, She Alone is poetry with a human center, as smart and affecting as anything else under review here, utterly original without special pleading on behalf of the poet. John Menaghan is the real thing.

David Mason
“The Poetry Circus”
THEHUDSON REVIEW
Volume LX, Number 1 (Spring 2007)

SHE ALONE, by John Menaghan. Salmon Poetry. Distributed in the U.S. by Dufour
Editions, Inc. $18.95p.