Timothy Donnelly's fourth collection of poems, Chariot, ferries the
reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both
philosophical and deeply embodied.
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.
"Donnelly is a poet everyone should read."--David Wheatley, The Guardian
"If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many
bills, and stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he
would have written these poems ... "--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"[The Cloud Corporation] is an extraordinary collection--the poetry
of the future, here, today."--John Ashbery, The London Times
Poetry.
