Synopsis "Chariot"
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 TimesPoetry.
