Chariot

Paul Scott Stanfield reviews Timothy Donnelly’s extended explorations of a closed form.

Timothy Donnelly, Chariot (Wave Books, 2023), 112pp.

Timothy Donnelly’s first book, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, appeared in 2003, and the subsequent ones—The Cloud Corporation (2010) and The Problem of the Many (2019)—came along at relatively lengthy intervals. He is not one of the USA’s more prolific poets, but happily, there is not a dud in the lot. Each book represents another dimension of what, twenty years in, looks like a major body of work. Chariot continues the run. It has many of the strengths of Donnelly’s previous books: his mastery of syntactical possibility, for example (the opening poem, “In My Life,” is a single sentence of twenty lines), or his Ashbery-like ability to drop a non sequitur with such deadpan matter-of-factness that the reader accepts it as inevitable (a consideration of periwinkle blue, “the tint of that eponymous / invasive ground cover whose simple blooms are known elsewhere / as the flower of death,” leads to “A Staples comes to mind”). Chariot, while still sounding like Donnelly, adds a new strength: extended explorations of a closed form. Donnelly has worked within formal constraints frequently, from “Accidental Species” in his first book to “Hymn to Life,” the closing poem in The Problem of the Many. Here, though, he ups the ante by working with one form for the entirety of the collection.

With a single exception, all the poems in Chariot consist of five four-line stanzas (“The Bard of Armagh,” a version of a late 17th-century Irish song attributed to one Bishop Patrick Donnelly, has six quatrains). End-rhymes are rare, but internal rhymes frequent. The lines are slightly on the longer side, elusively metered—neither accentual nor syllabic in any patterned way that I could discern, but subtly rhythmic nonetheless, often like a relaxed alexandrine. Stuck for a name for the form, I am going to call it a “chariot.”  Roomier than a sonnet, less defined by its rules than a sestina or villanelle, less discursive than an ode, the chariot has, thanks to Donnelly’s mastery of sentence structure and of the peculiar music of English, an internal architecture uniquely its own. There are 34 chariots in Part I of Chariot and another 34 in Part II (or 33 and “The Bard of Armagh”).

Often, Donnelly’s chariots include a sonnet-like turn, a volta, a surprising change in direction. Given his way with the seeming non sequitur, these turns can be of the hairpin, hold-on-tight variety, while still following an internal logic. They seemed to me a contemporary version of the conceits of Metaphysical poetry. “Night of the Marigolds” begins “Look how the marigolds catch the lamplight / from inside the apartment and bounce it back to us” and draws from this observation the generalization that “we come to be known by the way we respond to / what we suffer,” finding another example in the horse of Delacroix’s Horse Frightened by a Storm. The horse that “summarizes thunderclouds / lit by lightning rather than horse” reminds the speaker of himself, for whom the question of “what / it might have been, or what it isn’t” is “tumbling it over in my mouth / like raw stone.”  The stone of the simile becomes a pivot point by turning into an actual stone, which the speaker extracts from his mouth to find it not only smooth (“I expected it to be smooth”) but “troubled […] into the shape of a horse” which the speaker then rides into the night, “Marigolds towering over us […]”. The poem is a short but heady journey into the question of what we make of what makes us: “The matter of what we mean / embeds us like a warm Egyptian loam. There’s no disputing it.”

Samuel Johnson complained that in the Metaphysical conceit “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” and he might have balked at the idea of a marigold being like a horse, or of either being like one’s own ruminations, as he might have snorted at the idea of a figurative stone becoming in one’s mouth an actual stone that becomes a horse one rides among marigolds. Donnelly’s poems ask us to open up and examine our notions of the heterogeneous, however. As in Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” (Chariot includes a fine version of Baudelaire’s “Elevation”), secret sympathies weave a spiritual network among the most unlike things, creating “une ténébreuse et profonde unité.” “Night of Embodiment” begins with the speaker thinking of his fingers not as “distinct appendages” but as “fringes / at the end of my arms” (“fringes”/ “appendages” is one of the book’s sneaky rhymes). An association with the fringes of a leather bookmark carries us to “the purply tentacles / tasseling the sleeve-like body of a squid,” which takes us to “the Nile Delta, which feels like a whole // new thing, but nothing about the Nile is new […].” The Nile pivots us to papyrus and to the reeds in “thread-like rays” that will serve to make a stylus, and with the ink “from our squids’ ink-sacs” and those fringes at the end of our arms, we are ready to “document our travels for the future.”  And we will be doing some traveling, for Donnelly’s chariots cover a lot of territory, finding unsuspected paths between destinations Johnson would likely call heterogeneous.

Veins of wit and even playfulness run through Part I, but the harder questions also come up: for instance, the ability of language (or even of our senses) to represent phenomena truly. The first section’s last poem, “Head of Orpheus” (one of several instances of the book’s engagement with the symbolist painter Odilon Redon), both states the problem—“If only the mind were made to reflect / the world more completely, as if we agreed to it, we would be free // of so many difficulties”—and asserts the speaker’s tenacity in trying to work through it: “but know / as I go on detangling these lines from the invisible, it’s always you / I’m reaching out for, even more so now I can’t see where you’ve gone.” If Orpheus is the arch-poet, then Getting-It-Right may be the Eurydice he can never quite succeed in getting all the way out into the sunlight. While wit and playfulness by no means disappear in Part II (witness “Night of the Earworm” with its juggling of sounds, or “Instagram,” in which the key simile involves spaetzle), graver concerns about language, poetry, and vocation are more in the foreground.

Poetry, we could optimistically argue, bridges the gap between what we experience and what we can express, using language itself to transcend the limitations of our language. In Part II, Donnelly is willing to ask whether poetry is really up to the task.

  what if the poem itself
   is what’s narcissistic, irrespective
  of authorship, and this is
   what makes its appeal to us, not because it can love us but

  because it needs us to watch
   it love being
  itself, and the surplus we’re left with in
   the end is what we call beautiful, like starlight on snowfall?
  (“Digging for Apples”)

Perhaps there is even a kind of bossiness in poetry, in its insistence that the poet turn his consciousness of a particular night, with its “haze-like pliancy that almost feels like liberty,” into a poem; the moment’s delicious indeterminacy “has to be absorbed like a berry into a pie, / or a squirrel into thoughts of squirrels, night into this fistful of thistle” (“Air After Fireworks”). Does the poet even possibly lose the experience of, say, the sea by turning it into a poem?

   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.
  (“Hush”)

Is poetry a mistake, a falsification that serves no purpose? “I went about my so-called work / / but couldn’t see what for, what for” (“Mauled by Dogs”).

The doubts are reasonable ones, but I was grateful for the countervailing forces in Part II. “The Fish Ladder” tells us of things we do for reasons we cannot articulate but nonetheless feel important: “We hurl / / our self into it, being for this purpose. To come to see / what there is left to feel. To come to feel / some other. To come to know / what we want is. To be the fish on the ladder.” “The Voices” recalls two occasions when, mysteriously, the poet felt some power was, just as in the ancient stories, speaking to him, and “the takeaway was yes, they’d help me change the way I feel.” “Comfort” presents a lighthouse keeper, whose work “the rest of us can’t stop turning […] into a metaphor,” as it brings to mind all those who work to help people they may never meet, in the faith that they are indeed out there—writers, for example (although Donnelly instead conjures up a bakery late at night dispersing its “aroma of care”). Being an unacknowledged legislator of mankind is fine, Donnelly suggests, but poets can also find affirmation in their similarity to lighthouse keepers and bakers. Or ladybugs. In “Bóín Dé” (Irish for ladybug, literally “little cow of God”) Donnelly addresses the insect of the title:

  Little cow, blood-drop omen, stopped in front of me like a whole
    note in a chorus that celebrates the invisible
  labor of useless thought—you who had grown tired, I have grown
    old, but is it over, our irrelevant haven, this thimble’s worth of song?

No, it is not. It is not at all over.

It is certainly not over in the two poems titled, like the book itself, “Chariot.” “Chariot (I)” begins by remembering that “chair” can be a verb, meaning to bear or carry. Thinking of what we bear and carry (in the poem, tadpoles, among other things) brings to mind what bears and carries us (time, space), and—in a move worthy of Donne—lands on the idea that a book both bears and carries and is borne and carried: “as I just now read in a book, which is / a vessel to chair the world, itself a vessel to chair all possible books.”  “Chariot (II)” recalls that Mark Antony harnessed lions to his chariots, but insists that the real power of the chariot of language is not to bind, but to loose: “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.”

As twenty years ago Twenty-Seven Props seemed almost the archetype of a brilliant young poet’s debut book, a dazzling surface that kept its secrets closely guarded, so Chariot seems the work of a mature one, with its subtler music, deeper resonances, and—without being confessional, in the familiar sense—a deeper transparency, a greater openness.

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Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and has been a member of the English Department at Nebraska Wesleyan University since 1989. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.