Chariot

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.

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 WeeklyThere’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 ReviewI’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

• 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  Instagram  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