Chariot
If 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.
Across three increasingly encyclopedic books, inexhaustibility of thought has remained Donnelly’s constant. His variables have been his forms: his early Keatsian rewrites; the cascading tercets of The Cloud Corporation (2010); the 360-line fugal finale of The Problem of the Many (2019). In Chariot, his fourth and most compact book, Donnelly sticks to one structure: every poem comprises five quatrains, each ending mental miles from where it began. Take this quatrain from “Bóín Dé,” which opens on a literal translation of the title, Irish for “ladybug”:
Little cow of god, who had been sleeping on a pom-pom
I sewed by hand onto a store-bought curtain till I jostled you
awake, you who flew to my laptop’s light and landed on the staves of
my worksurface, tell me—am I dying?
All in a sentence’s work, Donnelly modulates from an ode to an existential crisis, taking time to survey a domestic environment embellished “by hand” yet “store-bought”; his laptop-lit art is similarly patchwork, as close to musical composition (“staves”) as to capitalist production (“worksurface”).
Like its clearest predecessors—the perfect squares (four stanzas of four lines) of John Ashbery’s Shadow Train (1981)—Chariot gives the impression of talking about everything imaginable while talking around its truest concerns. A poem on the weather, that small-talk mainstay, circles round to inspect “these sentences, which make their own weather out of inquiring” immense questions: “how is it possible we live, die, and are born?” Maintaining “hope / to find a work that will accommodate the whole of what I’ve felt,” Donnelly runs continually up against his self-made constraints, against time “pulling us along / in its procession like a chariot.” “How did we get here?” Donnelly wonders in a shrugging title poem: “Unclear, if it matters; what matters // is we stay.”
