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Timothy Donnelly’s fourth collection of poems, Chariot, ferries the reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both philosophical and deeply embodied.
“How did we get here?” he asks in his title poem—one of several in conversation with French symbolist Odilon Redon—to which he responds, “Unclear, if it matters; what matters // is we stay—aloft in possible color.” With a similar sensibility to previous collections The Problem of the Many and The Cloud Corporation (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award), Chariot deepens Donnelly’s inquiry into artistic histories, from Jean Cocteau to The Cocteau Twins, while celebrating the power of poetic imagination to transport us to new zones of meaning and textual bliss. The collection also marks an exciting shift in form for Donnelly, who confines these new poems to twenty lines each, so that to read Chariot is to look through a many-paned, future-facing window, refracting and reflecting, letting all the light in.
These poems are firmly lyric, eschewing narrative. With each poem undertaking a formal constraint of twenty lines across five stanzas, I found myself delighted to linger and trace Donnelly’s twisting syntaxes.
Mike Good, Colorado ReviewAs twenty years ago Twenty-Seven Props seemed almost the archetype of a brilliant young poet’s debut book, a dazzling surface that kept its secrets closely guarded, so Chariot seems the work of a mature one, with its subtler music, deeper resonances, and—without being confessional, in the familiar sense—a deeper transparency, a greater openness.
Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of BooksIf you don’t associate twenty-first-century poetry with joyrides, try hopping on Timothy Donnelly’s trains of thought. They run on unpredictable tracks, given to unpunctuated accelerations, slapstick Freudian slips, shortcuts through slang, throwbacks into archaism, and frequent detours through English’s baggiest, least redeemable registers—followed, just as frequently, by conclusions of epigrammatic crispness.
Christopher Spaide, Poetry FoundationChariot pursues the future while prying into the past, all with Donnelly’s signature wit and variousness.
New England ReviewDonnelly appears as the almost-unwilling captain of the ship of absurdity which all sail upon, and that poetry attempts to clarify. These layered poems are full of worthy questions.
Publishers Weekly
There’s nothing new about poets interrogating their own medium, but Donnelly does it in a more satisfying way (at least to me) than most because for him it’s much more than an intellectual problem to solve; it’s how he expresses (quite beautifully) a deeply felt (and enchanted) kind of epistemological heartbreak, a key element to Donnelly’s work that Richard Howard identified in the poet’s first book twenty years earlier and is still felt today.
John Ebersole,Tourniquet Review
I’m less certain that long poems are necessarily more challenging than shorter poems, something Timothy Donnelly’s excellent new collection,Chariothas underscored. But ‘challenging’ isn’t quite the right word. These poems are dense, elusive, impenetrable, clouded, thick....(but) there has always been a wry lightness, coupled with a thoroughgoing earnestness, to Donnelly’s elusive poetry, and Chariot continues that tradition. That somewhat off-kilter combination is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Donnelly’s work, and it’s a hallmark of his voice.
Kevin O'Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019), The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003). His chapbook Hymn to Life was published by Factory Hollow Press. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien he is the co-author of Three Poets published by Minus A Press in 2012. He is a recipient of The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
CONTENTS
I
In My Life
Nothing Happened
Sea Whistle
Night of the Marigolds
Summerhead
Excelsior
The Light
Etruscan Vase with Flowers
Drift
Elevation
Where Space Begins
The Yellow Boat
Night of the Gowanus
Weather Heard as Music
Angel of the Hearth
No Small Task
Night of Embodiment
Honeymouth
Myth
Complicity
All Vanishes
Eau de Nil
Domesticity
Nocturne
Not Much More to It than That
Night of Oblivion
Vantablack
Eglantine
Likely Story
The Gist of It
Night of the MacGuffin
The Cows
Ultramarine
Head of Orpheus
II
The Bard of Armagh
A Page from the Weather
Boom
Beauport
What It Is About People
Home at Last
Digging for Apples
Air After Fireworks
Mauled by Dogs
Reality Hit Me
The Material World
Night of the Earworm
Hammer of the Sun
Further Education
Notes on Flow
Heritage
Mill
Night of the Sound
Wandering Castle
Hush
Pink Lotus
Saint Bride
The Fish Ladder
Golden Hour
The Voices
Comfort
Point Being
Enchantment
Bóín Dé
Chariot (I)
Chariot (II)
This Is the Assemblage
Acknowledgements & Notes