CPR - Timothy Donnelly Reviewed By James Rother

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Not every youngish poet is lucky enough to have a Richard Howard riding shotgun for him on his first stage run into Deadwood. Having the endorsement of so imposing a figure so early in one’s poetic career is like having the trades at your back when other ships of the line are stuck in horse latitudes and doldrums.

Timothy Donnelly, whose first book Twenty-seven Props for a Production of “Ein Lebenszeit” appeared three years ago under the Grove Press imprint, but somehow missed blipping the radar at CPR, seems descended from some offshore trust of salty young British—note that I didn’t say English—poets numbering Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon among its stalwarts. Clearly he must have the luck of the Irish, for his work not merely elicited a commendation from the author of Alone with America, but drew him far enough out on what is for him an unaccustomed limb to encourage the use of epithets like “authoritative” and to give Donnelly’s “brilliant (and unabrogable) book” a hearty two-thumbs-up. Coming as it does from so far on high, mightn’t Donnelly’s investiture be taken as a sign that if the American poetry revival, (long a gleam in the eye of poetry magazine editors persuaded like Jiminy Cricket that “wishing makes it so”) is a concern, then it must certainly be a going one? But skepticism—even of the healthy kind—aside, shouldn’t the naysayers and doubting Thomases who have pooh-poohed that revival from the get-go now, in light of the riches put up by a first collection like Donnelly’s Twenty-seven Props, perhaps give serious thought to shutting up?

Well, yes and no. To cautious arbiters of the writing game—especially of poetry—fulsome praise for any performance just out of the gate is at best premature. Powerful precedents abound of seeds withering early in the American frost and never reaching maturity, whereas successful follow-ups to triumphant literary debuts are about common in America as second acts in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. As unwise as it is to second-guess gurus like Richard Howard about careers having the longest legs (few possess his nose for sensing when real game is afoot), despite evidence—and yes, it is strong—that Donnelly is on top of his game at present, it still cannot be predicted with anything like assurance what a talent such as his might elect do next, or which comb the bee in his bonnet might see fit to infuse with magic honey. Playing mind games with Erato (the most skittish of all the Nine) is as perilous as recycling tea-leaves earlier pronounced upon by a Richard Howard. Nor does musing along such lines become any less dicey by conceding that the aid and abettance so far tendered Donnelly by Erato seems over the top even for her.

Still, it can’t be denied that the show of craft made in this collection is well beyond that of some trim new windjammer with an automatic pilot for tiller. Donnelly’s use of supple idiom is on view in virtually all its pages and recalls (in the other sense) the orotund metaphorics postwar English surrealists Henry Treece and Vernon Watkins were wont to roll out when they weren’t either researching the Crusades or rethinking Mario Praz on how surrealism differs from neo-Gothicism. Recalls and replaces it with a control of breathlessness and image-making seen only in the work of such superior prose poets as Baudelaire—who began it all—whenever the likelihood of a line coming up roses on the working side of the horizon looms no more promisingly than a mirage detailing heat surges in the desert:

We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters.

Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then,

spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes

across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned:

I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn.

Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers

to a graveyard but yards from our unfinished raking, caught

neighbors peering down through parts in high curtains

to catch us there, looking. Oldest stone. Newest stone. Smallest. . . .

(“Scarecrow in Magnolia”)

The exceptional maneuverability of such a style allows for an athletic scudding and skimming but is notorious for running on empty when slower and steadier slew rates are called for. Moreover, the Katzenjammer-esque play on “fall” and “autumn” in the middle tercet of the quotation above might trigger Sisyphean labors of inference in certain readerly minds unequipped to handle multiple puns; and it might also be necessary (if not strictly politic) to remind this poet that Stevensian exercises in which oohs and ahs are deemed lavishable on the woozy incandescence ordinary scarecrows take on when bathed in moonshine no longer survive even a power-point presentation, let alone someone regurgitating in low-tech “The Man on the Dump.”

Still, this piece, like others that leap out at one in the Donnelly book, may be said to squeak by on fiddler’s molto allegro alone, its signature sound the click of billiard ball hitting on billiard ball in execution of a carom by a wizard with a cue. Donnelly’s famous mentor was right about one thing: whatever the degree of depth, or lack of it, one is willing to grant the 47 poems of Twenty-seven Props, the poet who voiced them commands an array of smarts no run of dumb luck by an ephebe could ever assemble in one place, and many of them are wholly technical.

Because of this one might be eager, given the range of Donnelly’s gifts, to second Howard’s generous embrace of them. One might, were it less often the case that the poems caught on the page don’t always escape having been whipped up more as soufflés than concoctions liable to fall into themselves with a telltale sough or hiss. The spotty attention Donnelly gives to musical nicety doesn’t make such swansongs any less off-putting, though to single him out for what among today’s younger poets is almost a universal dereliction would be nitpicking in the extreme. What readers of his book can glory in is the depth of commitment with which he keeps his centrifugal tendencies on the shortest of leashes. (They are allowed roaming privileges only when reeling in the beast with gusto would render what Donnelly’s otherwise brash experimentalism was flying in the face of insufficiently obvious.) He’s a stylist who will use every device in his arsenal to keep unwanted effects from scoring against him, and conversely, he is able to summon the acerbity of a backhand artist acing a match point whenever a desirable one needs to be smashed home with especial force. When need arises, he can coo like an Ashbery waltzing a rune to its outer margins, or, without missing a beat, come on like Kenneth Koch springing unyoked heterogeneities on the hairshirt enthusiasts weaned on Bradstreet and Taylor. Though regrettably—and one keeps coming back to this—not as musically adept as one might like (the touting of his “musical brilliance” by Jorie Graham in a blurb is as gushing as it is randomly lubricious), Donnelly’s verse is far from tone-deaf. Seldom does he let his grasp of cadence and rhythm wander far off the plantation; his problem is more with matching euphonies within lines and seeing them carried over where syntactical sense leads.

Take, for instance, “Accidental Species,” a lyric in six numbered segments, each containing a pair of ten-line stanzas laid out in the loose-ish iambics the poet favors, though not to the exclusion of other means of prosodic control. Occasionally given to cutting out (like certain cellular services known for dropping calls), its vocalic line flies blind on its own instancing of what now deftly, now more gawkishly, it imposes in the way of rubato, hoisting a manner reminiscent of a Tom Stoppard in decrying all fourteen stations of the crass. And all this in the service of beaching a Prospero whose enchantments prompt terrors as personally felt as other-directed:

Delivered here by hurricane, what path

a panic wind defined, abashing me wild

latitudes from what I would have been,

from bird beatified, bird fed; who am I now

who am, who in the violence of the storm

steered only in accordance—and was lost; who starts

disturbance in the flock; who is achingly

unreal, even in itself, and yet—who cannot help

but be gregarious; who twists a tense

black-banded neck, investigates faint song; . . .

An entrée to what resembles at first a bill of nesciences culled from a sedatee’s redaction of Howl, “Accidental Species” works its way from montage to Lautréamontage with a film novice’s undying faith in the final cut to see every sore thumb sticking up in an extended shoot excised from its crime scene. But the torpedoes aimed at sense can only safely be damned when a Poseidon of a poem like this can navigate waves as swampingly cataclysmic as those raised by Donnelly—albeit shrunk to the portable dimensions of one soul’s psychic squall. Yet, there are problems here not susceptible to being smoothed out in the mix, one of which is the untonsured raggedness of schema that not infrequently attends pieces like this that are more intent on ranging through incremental repetitions of flash and filigree than in fleshing out their raison d’être as poems. The charming incorrigibility of Donnelly’s poetic demeanor quite rightly has Richard Howard wondering if readers distracted by his style might not wish to ask of this particular Alfie, “What’s it all about—what is [he] saying?” Such frustrations are hardly put to rest by the sort of placebo trotted out in Howard’s Introduction that an “ars poetica” doubling as “a lover’s complaint” needn’t trouble itself terribly much about whether or not its concerns are crystal clear.

“Accidental Species” is not the only fly in this collection’s balmy ointment. Right up there beside it in the “Is this trip really necessary?” department are “Sonata Ex Machina” and “Pansies Under Monkshood: A Folly.” As is not infrequently noted in Donnelly’s glider runs, his flight paths take him high enough over accumulating thickets of sense to almost make the reader believe that the mileage his poem seems to be racking up is somehow in sync with the speed he is flying at. Such distorting-lens exuberance would drain his poems of their effort to return verse to the sort of activity that can be counted on to give readers as well as poets themselves a rush were it not for his ability—as shown in the homage to the ‘40s artist Bill Traylor, “Kneeling Man with Cane on Construction”)—to bring to bear not just Stevensian moonshine but that master’s breadth of can-do (and not just with poem titles) on the job at hand. And not only in those tight spots where lesser versifiers are wont to rely on cant to get them past gossipy whirlpools and wandering crocks that could often belabor the post-Harmonium Stevens himself:

Tonight’s full moon’s a circle pressed mechanically.

It speaks to the cardboard’s first purpose, a mystery.

Or, supposing the drawer didn’t draw upon, but drew,

the moon’s the tracing of a coin, or whatever round you

imagine. Encompassing all possibilities is impossible.

Always another surprises, as once a shock of purple

knocked all of Alabama to its knees, and then it

vanished. A top-hatted man’s a girl in a bonnet

whose good dog’s pizzle drizzled its deliberate

puzzle in the earth, with dignity, as Jesus did, albeit

with His finger. . . .

Of course, it goes without saying that the last few lines quoted above would’ve set off alarm bells for the prissy anecdotalist of jars, who, after tentatively fondling the subject of female masturbation in the early poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier“ (1915), skirted all controversy (barring a brief flirtation with leftist homiletics in the ‘30s) with as much religious fervor as he shunned the off-color.

Paddling in a different wading pool than the neo-modernists and coming off a factitious high induced by decades of faux-surrealism have made poets of Donnelly’s post-PoMo generation chary of and turned off by tricks of the trade that got New York school and comparable prestidigitalists their three-pointers from downtown. Unlike the modernist real thing of a Stevens, who, though being no stranger to masks only sported, in the manner of a T. S. Eliot, those of his own Laforguian approximation, Donnelly is likely as not to don the antic buskin of a Samuel Beckett (“Chance of Infinity in A Little Room”); or an A. R. Ammons (“The Spleen’s Own Music”); or a John Ashbery (“Isn’t It Romantic” and “Maintenance”). On occasion, the influence of W. S. Merwin can be seen off in the distance (“Self Exhibited as A Wasting Phoenix”) and even that of Richard Howard is not above insinuating its self-styled presence between the sheets (“Anything To Fill In the Long Silences”). Liminally looming predecessions are not anathema to Donnelly’s peer group, nor is tripping the not so light fantastic “into the pit where the demons fiddle, but not for all ears— / such spinning, such music—of the nauseous spheres.” Drugs, we’re hearing increasingly, are back among the young, if they ever really went away, though it is only fair to point out that while substance is not always under effective control in Donnelly’s work, substances are—at least from where the poet is standing, observing, judging:

What wanderlust has wrecked your skirts?

They’ve ceased to swish that certain way,

that distingué, that way they did days halcyon,

what goings-on have been going on, keep

going on, that flounce’s flown, that fringe’s fled,

once chestnut brown went chestnut red, and now

it’s rust. Philosophy, and rusted skirts, they just don’t swish.

Your chestnut skirts—

Better to keep quiet. Corrosion starts

which can’t be stopped in the hidden parts—

in the joints, the folds, the seams, the borders.

Carnation, lily, lily, rose. The cloister’s moister

than the monks suppose. What grows there rots,

what rots there grows. Carnation, lily, lily, rose. . . .

How long has it been since American poetry sounded so unabashed, so insouciant, so, so . . . so Irish? Had Yeats survived a third or fourth childhood, he might’ve begun to sound like this, like a Seamus Heaney executing more playfully sinister rounds than he’s accustomed to. Or maybe Donnelly has just been reading his Paul Muldoon a little too absorptively.