These poems are firmly lyric, eschewing narrative. With each poem undertaking a formal constraint of twenty lines across five stanzas, I found myself delighted to linger and trace Donnelly’s twisting syntaxes.
Mike Good, Colorado Review
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.
Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of Books
If you don’t associate twenty-first-century poetry with joyrides, try hopping on Timothy Donnelly’s trains of thought. They run on unpredictable tracks, given to unpunctuated accelerations, slapstick Freudian slips, shortcuts through slang, throwbacks into archaism, and frequent detours through English’s baggiest, least redeemable registers—followed, just as frequently, by conclusions of epigrammatic crispness.
Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation
Chariot pursues the future while prying into the past, all with Donnelly’s signature wit and variousness.
New England Review
Donnelly appears as the almost-unwilling captain of the ship of absurdity which all sail upon, and that poetry attempts to clarify. These layered poems are full of worthy questions.
Publishers Weekly
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.
John Ebersole,Tourniquet Review
I’m less certain that long poems are necessarily more challenging than shorter poems, something Timothy Donnelly’s excellent new collection,Chariothas underscored. But ‘challenging’ isn’t quite the right word. These poems are dense, elusive, impenetrable, clouded, thick....(but) there has always been a wry lightness, coupled with a thoroughgoing earnestness, to Donnelly’s elusive poetry, and Chariot continues that tradition. That somewhat off-kilter combination is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Donnelly’s work, and it’s a hallmark of his voice.
Kevin O'Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review
