Damien B Donnelly doesn’t write to be heard, he writes to remember, to revisit, to reframe the stories that shaped him and the silences that nearly swallowed him whole. His poems arrive slowly now, less out of urgency, more like cautious companions that need courting. “I finally learned that each one takes time to gestate,” he says. “Even after birth, it needs further time to find form.” There’s a tenderness to his process, but also discipline, the kind born from heartbreak, reinvention, and lived experience. “You get to date, for a while… until you become so acquainted with each other you’re finally able to let it go.”
This isn’t youthful navel-gazing. Damien’s voice has shifted from the self-obsessed immediacy of early work to a broader, more nuanced lens. “In your teens and 20s, you’re certain the world shifts just for you,” he reflects. “At 50, you realise if you don’t get shifting and look at all the sides, all the shades, you’ll get left behind.” That self-awareness is earned, and it’s not just thematic, it’s sonic. His podcast journey taught him the importance of the spoken line. “If I trip over a line repeatedly, it’s because it isn’t working. Read your work out loud, listen to how it fills the space around you.”
Visuals often light the first match, a flash of movement, an overheard sentence, the scent of someone long gone but suddenly near again. “Poems for me often start with the visual… a fleeting moment, caught in the corner of the eye,” he explains. Not the full picture, but the suggestion. That ambiguity becomes fuel. Sometimes he’ll speak the work first, recording voice notes mid-walk or in transit, letting the language catch up with the emotion. “Then I transcribe the audio onto the page and see how that shift alters content and form.”
What separates Damien’s voice from the pack is the unflinching return to old wounds, but with new tools. Early poems about adoption once cast him as the abandoned boy, “little boy blue, given up, left behind.” But the current work seeks the prequel, the missing chapters, the other voices in that story. “Now they’re about the stories I don’t yet know… tales that unfolded before I arrived which later directed my path.” This is no longer therapy, it’s archaeology.
He writes too about the kind of queer adolescence that never was. “As a closeted kid, I wrote about wanting to find love like everyone else,” he says. “But now, out and older, I’m giving voice to a kid who didn’t have the opportunity to have those adolescent sexual experiences.” There’s anger in that, but also generosity, a desire to name what was denied and to let the next generation know they weren’t alone, even retroactively.
Damien doesn’t just write in rooms. He writes on buses, trains, planes. “My poems often avoid full stops, or try to. I like taking a deep breath and diving into the lines.” Motion isn’t just metaphor, it’s method. In Paris, he used to write in parks, on terraces, surrounded by city chaos. “It felt like a superpower… to leave the city and its noise and disappear into creation.”
But not all creation comes from peace. In 2018, atop a dormant volcano in South Korea, Damien had his first panic attack. “I was convinced it was a heart attack… that I was going to die in a place where no one cared.” He wasn’t alone, but he felt it. His partner at the time was transitioning, and the weight of dual transformation nearly drowned them both. “I was the willing carrier at the time… carting all our baggage through what felt like an endless voyage.” Poetry became the rope back to shore. “It helped me dig a way out… writing new lines when the counting didn’t work, when the Xanax felt like useless jellybeans.”
The result? A body of work built from both grit and grace. His collections, Back from Away (Turas Press), Enough! (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), chart a life lived in both translation and transition. New work in The Stoney Thursday Book, Skylight 47, and Beautiful Little Fools (Broken Spine Arts) shows a poet still evolving, still haunted, still hopeful.
Damien B Donnelly doesn’t perform the role of poet. He lives it, in fragments, in transit, in the long shadow of past selves and the quiet triumph of surviving them.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
