With Chariot, Timothy Donnelly gives us a tidy package of sixty-eight poems of identical short length and structure. Each twenty line poem, organized into quatrains (the workhorse stanza of English), touches on a variety of philosophical and aesthetic themes. One of Donnelly’s most productive subjects is expressing how opposing forces act upon his mind. He’s an obsessive noticer of paradox:
I have never seen the Milky Way the way it looks in pictures
in my feed on Instagram—which is to say like the trail of froth
a sperm whale makes in videos when it swims up close
to the air, but immeasurably more luminous, and spattered everywhere
in tiny barnacles of stars, whole portions of the sky
stained improbably azure, purple, teal; a general sense of
superimposition but no real threat of being pounced on or made to suffer
in captivity, the specter of symphonic music off in the background
of the mind relaxing with neurochemicals any suspicion
vis-à-vis authenticity or preference to not be made a fool of
except by invitation, telling itself somewhere along the way
it agreed to go along with everything so long as no one gets hurt—
but I have seen its local counterpart in the residues of industry
haunting the Gowanus Canal, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
and polychlorinated biphenyls, coal tar wastes and heavy metals
dazzling the surface of the waterway in galactic shapes in peacock
green, gold, sapphire, and while I have no desire to make pollution
beautiful or to see it romantically, a voice says that’s exactly
what I’m doing, while another whispers down to me from a remove,
saying I am in my life like a dolphin, like a dolphin trapped in a cove.
The poet's word choice is rich and varied; his language a fusion of the celestial ("immeasurably more luminous"), the ecological ("residues of industry") and the scientific ("polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons"). This blending of vocabularies underscores the meeting of the artificial and natural worlds in the poem, and the choice to use the exact scientific names for the pollutants conveys a sense of authenticity, perhaps aiming to counter, with empirical precision, the often oversimplified portrayals in the virtual world. This deliberate use of the chemist's language also highlights the intricate severity of the pollutants, an approach that stands in contrast to how social media flattens the complexities of our environment. In the concluding stanza, the poem contrasts the objective lens of the scientist (using terms like "polychlorinated biphenyls") with the visionary perspective of a poet, invoking images that are like "galactic shapes." This juxtaposition culminates in the poignant metaphor of a "dolphin trapped in a cove," signifying the poet’s struggle to reconcile (or to embrace) the dialectical impasse between reality and imagination.
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Across his career, Donnelly's poetry has been characterized by rich rhythmic densities, emphasizing a poetic line (and sentence) that continuously merges and separates sound and meaning. Unlike his previous works, which featured an assemblage of lavish couplets, tireless tercets, serialized behemoths, and peculiar nonce forms, Chariot stands out for its formally concise quatrains, committing the poet to an intriguing project. In approaching Chariot, I was curious to see how his usual excess of thought and style, suddenly confined to twenty lines across five stanzas, would navigate poems with clearly defined endpoints, and the results are impressive. Donnelly’s abundance and the poetry’s concise structure become palpably intertwined:
A squirrel, startled, sets out across the street in successive little leaps
like the scalloped edging in front-yard gardens used to divide
flowerbeds from the lawn, or like the rim of a glass pie plate
and then of the pie itself, blueberry, its top crust like a clock face
browning in the oven. Likewise, the squirrel’s leaping pattern
recalls the seconds, minutes, and the hours, which have thus far
proved interminable. Measurements like these, which organize
one’s experience of time and space—including inches, Tuesdays,
summers, decibels, and milligrams—differ from pure mathematics,
which expresses itself through the physical but exists
prior to expression and so remains independent of it. This differs, too, from how
my thoughts on squirrels, fireworks, sicknesses and pie exist—
viz., with a haze-like pliancy that almost feels like liberty
from the spatiotemporal, but without objects to refer to, with no
initial gasp at vibrant suddenness or past captivation by aromas
arrowing in my direction in a diagram of the kitchen, all my concepts
disappear, and I’m walking back from the drugstore not knowing
what’s happening, what anything is anymore, or where my person
begins, ends, and why it has to be absorbed like a berry into a pie,
or a squirrel into thoughts of squirrels, night into this fistful of thistle.
Similar to Stevens, Donnelly produces a pleasing detachment in the reader and this sensation persists in Chariot thanks to the poet’s skillful (and semi-aggressive) application of simile, long lines (replete with beats), a flexuous syntax, and an alternating indentation pattern. These techniques, in addition to creating “a haze-like pliancy,” enable Donnelly to tackle complex subjects, here exploring the cross-grained metrics of time, the way they pull at us, like simile itself, in two directions at once. And yet there’s moments, albeit few, when a more severe line attempts to triumph:
Mark Antony broke
lions to the yoke, and was the first Roman to harness them
to a chariot. He did this to demonstrate how even the most valorous
hearts can be bent
into service. His enemies
got the message. As for me, I don’t like to see points made
as brutally as that, or our metaphors bound so tight, that entities that might
animate each other
perpetually, in radiant
transport (and not just enemies and lions anymore, but anything we have a word for—apples, amphitheaters, happiness, icebergs, loss),
end up instead
bound by force, flattening
being into deathlike stasis. As I write, I don’t want to be dead any more than I want to see the breathing flower of our language suffer
into service, but I know
as well as anyone
that’s the nature of it. And yet, moving forward, if another sentence follows on the heels, as this one does, I say that when it ends, its ending will
unharness lions.
Here, what begins as a kind of protest against the way words are hammered into propaganda (“broke//lions”) or denuded into cliché (“bent//into service”), ends in a kind of hopeful vision where a more liberated and dynamic use of language can prevail. Some artists are drawn to interrogating the materials of their art and Donnelly’s work embodies this pursuit. The speakers in the poems often grapple with the limitations of language to fully capture or convey the complexities of the world around us, while simultaneously recognizing the power of language to shape our understanding of that world. Below, he takes his investigations to the extreme.
Wanting my mind to be quiet as a child, I wondered if a thought
could survive without words, which always came along
with sound, with noise, even when unspoken, and so I set out to stop—
surveilling the room from the raft of the bed—my eyes briefly,
wordlessly, when they landed on red—stop sign corkboard, Merriam-
Webster’s, stripes on the flag atop Old Ironsides—and even as I
sensed this wasn’t actual thinking, I was sure at the time
what I was making, stringing reds together, was a sentence.
Night falls; night falls again, harder; night falls a third time, into the forest
and the trees trap it there, batting it back and forth
like cats at play with a cockroach, confusing it in its injury
till it transforms into energy, into the heat that feeds the night
and keeps it restless, an endless circuit like a fountain of crude
no light can escape from, falling deeper into the spread of itself
forever—but there are no words for what it does; it is the space
at the mind’s molten core where there are no words, there can be
no sound, no noise; the aberration of language only takes place
outside its borders, our babble skitters off in fear of it
like goats down Mount Etna before the eruption, before the gasp as I
sense what I made of red wasn’t just a sentence: it was an invitation.
This poem, titled "Vantablack," refers to a material that absorbs nearly all light and creates an absence of color, highlighting the poem’s theme of absence and the limits of language and thought. For those familiar with Lacan, the poem offers a faint connection to the concept of the Real—that unruly dimension beyond the symbolic. Donnelly skillfully navigates this realm with a voice both independent from, yet tethered to, the ballast of words (a constant tension shot through his work), guiding us both inward and outward all at once. As the poem edges towards closure, the poet reasserts his faith in simile—which he never uses as strategic distraction or to express discontentment with description—but as a way to plumb greater depths (here, by ironically depicting a spilling-forth), before finishing the poem in a paradox where the final word anticipates its own presence.
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.
At night the sea’s surface is the penetrable onyx of deep sleep.
I enter it without fear, as if to lower the input of the eye
reduces risk, and whatever I can’t presently see
exists only in memory, which has been calmed by the water’s
cold hypnosis, and to be here is impersonal. Only the moonlight
interrupts this near-nothingness, the play of it on the glossy swell
like a music you can feel, or like the mapping of something happening to me
on another level, something that can only be understood
so long as it never finishes, and when it finishes, there is nothing
left to understand. In the distance, other lights appear now
on the far side of the harbor, and closer, the dull white gull-like hulls
of a band of anchored boats rock softly, without intelligence.
Later, elsewhere, I remember it vaguely, and it feels like the only
meaningful way to go about it, as if the value of it grew
by resisting precision, and that in coaxing particularity to glide from it
the sea retained a unity unlike anything other than the sky
with which it had come to merge, but likewise it set itself outside
the reach of grammar, whose designs on it were not kind, and yet
what I mean by “it” isn’t even the sea anymore, but an experience
of the sea, which syllable by syllable I make the mistake of displacing.
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Donnelly’s Chariot has a Notes section where we learn that five of the poems in the book are translations and that several others are direct (or indirect) responses to a specific painting, text, film, or song. We also get a sense (if one is curious about such things) of how the book is structured: the first of Chariot’s two sections is disproportionally weighted with poems inspired by outside sources; the remaining sections less so. The Notes also give us a glimpse into Donnelly’s cultural affinities, which make several pitstops around Europe. While the translations are solid and admirable (the Lautréamont translation is particularly audacious), I enjoyed the poems about paintings the most; I like the peculiar sensation I get reading Donnelly move through each one. The one below is titled Saint Bride by John Duncan, followed by the poem of the same name.
Duncan’s angels, whose red-black-pink and gold-green wings
exceed the margins of the picture plane and inch
out onto the decorative border, carry the sleeping body of the saint
across the Hebridean sea and back in time to Bethlehem where she
will be Mary’s midwife and Christ’s wet nurse. Her hands perch
on her chest in prayer, ghostlier even than the foot
of the angel who flies in front—its face (seen in full) directing our eye
to the face (in profile) of the saint, its toes likewise dipping
into the trim, which is of gold zigzags, lozenges and dots on a thin
strip of brown, outlined in madder. Here one impossibility
dances with another, and another, and as decorously as waitstaff
at La Coupole in Paris, over which the angels might have passed if
they flew to the Nativity via the direct route. My guess is
they did not. My guess is angels place no premium on efficiency
when trucking in miracles. When I saw the picture in Edinburgh
I stared for half an hour before gathering the most human face in it
was the seal’s, and that it isn’t really a seal, but the artist himself
in seal form, or else how could he have known twin seagulls flew
along in retinue, that angels’ tunics are so wickedly emblazoned, or which
waves that night wove blue-green-blue with little bits of purple?
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JOHN EBERSOLE is co-editor of Tourniquet Review. He lives in Houston, Texas.