The Writers of Wales Database

DONAHAYE, JASMINE

Email: jasmine.donahaye@planetmagazine.org.uk
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Jasmine Donahaye’s latest collection is Self-portrait as Ruth (Salt, 2009). Her first collection, Misappropriations, published by Parthian, was short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 2006, and her poetry won the Joan Lee Yang Memorial Poetry Prize in 2000 and an Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in 1999. She is currently writing a work of creative non-fiction entitled The Palestine or Orange-tufted Sunbird, which is supported by an Academi Writer's Bursary.

Jasmine served for two years as Publishing Grants Officer at the Welsh Books Council, has worked as editor for a number of publishers, and teaches Creative Writing part-time at Aberystwyth University. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where her mentors were the poets Thom Gunn and Robert Hass, and at Swansea University. Her publications on Israel/Palestine and Welsh/Jewish connections and interactions have appeared in Wales, England and the US.

Self-Portrait as Ruth (Salt Publishing, 2009) was on the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

Selected Publications:
Misappropriations (Parthian, 2006)
Self-Portrait as Ruth (Salt Publishing, 2009)
Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (University of Wales Press, 2011)

Contributed to:
Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (contributor) (University of Wales Press, 2004)
Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias (editor) (Honno, 2004)
British Jewish Women Writers: 1880-1980 (contributor) (Wayne State University Press, 2007)
‘The Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (contributor) (Palgrave, 2008)
Slanderous Tongues: Essays on Welsh Poetry in English 1970 – 2000 (contributor) (Seren, 2009)




Misappropriations (Parthian, 2006)

This debut collection of poetry ranges in subject matter across the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, belonging and emigration, troubling aspects of childhood and parenthood, and sexuality and desire. It includes provocative poems dealing with Jewish identity and the Middle East, and sometimes disturbing poems touching on abortion, anorexia, child abuse, the experience of labour, and the difficulties of motherhood, set against landscapes in Wales, Israel, California and England.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover


 
Self-Portrait as Ruth (Salt Publishing, 2009)

This 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". 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.

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, please click on its front cover