Synopses & Reviews
Timothy Donnelly's poems have already garnered a following in some of America's best literary journals (The Paris Review, Ploughshares), and the long-awaited publication of his first collection of poetry will make a spectacular new addition to the Grove Press Poetry Series. Donnelly seduces the reader with his ability to summon up just about any topic, sensibility, or thought, with the self-assurance and effortlessness of a skilled master. The title poem is a brilliant expose of an imaginary play that is an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. Donnelly imagines a stage and populates it with objects that emerge as pictorial and poetic anchors punctuating the enveloping verse. As the poem craftily weaves around these, its energy builds up to a climax that is both a luminous poetic offering and an amatory overture at the reader. In "Accidental Species," he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica ("If I only had a crutch I wouldn't wobble / half so much") by way of a heartbreaking lover's complaint ("The terror I inspired I am made to feel"). Acclaimed by Richard Howard as "brilliant and masterful," Timothy Donnelly's premiere work combines an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance and syntactical intricacy with a stunning poetic maturity. For its thoughtfulness and range, for the sheer energy of its rhetoric, and for the audacity of its poetic acumen, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable debut collection from one of our most outstanding and original young poets.
Review
"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence. In Donnellys poetry we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity. This book is an accomplishment true to the powers of poetry and also to our need." Allen Grossman
Review
"Audacious of whimsy, ferocious of style....A strutting, dazzling, exhilarating body of work....Donnelly is unquestionably the real deal, shifting registers between the colloquial and the vatic....Deciphering his inventive, intricate palimpsests may take time, but its worth the effort. Donnellys exuberant rhymes and enjambed rhythms immediately draw a reader in." J.Y. Yeh, The Village Voice
Review
"Since when is a first book this exuberant, this bountiful, this intelligent, this fanciful, this strange? As Donnelly writes: All the world is here. And moreover, this happens to be true. In the vast taxonomy of poetry, Timothy Donnelly is a herd of one." Lucie Brock-Broido
Review
"Timothy Donnellys book is wide-awake and aims to awaken. Its project what are the traits that delineate the human? is wondrously traditional, ambitious, and daunting; its formal intelligence and fertility seemingly endless. It joys in language, thrills in the devices of poetic thought, aims far, is honest, is structurally hard-won, is musically brilliant and articulate. It is that rare thing in poetry a passionate meditation, wild ride, fun read, and a wrenching, sometimes even scary, document regarding who we were and are." Jorie Graham