Timothy Donnelly, _The Problem of the Many_

 BOOKS SUCH AS this give me hope, not because The Problem of the Many is in tone hopeful or optimistic or uplifting—its score on any such scale would be modest, at best—but because the mere fact that anyone will take poetry seriously enough to write this well and construct a book this carefully and take the pains that have here been taken...well, that such things happen gives me hope. 

Seven years between Donnelly’s first book and his second, and then another nine for this one, his third, so as I finish Part 1 of The Problem of the Many, I am thinking, “Hmm, Mr. Donnelly, you know that would have made a nice slender volume all on its own.” Part 1 has intriguing formal variety, the ancient world as a leitmotif, and a corker long poem with which to close. Moreover, it sketches an expansively fertile theme: the relation of individual units (of matter, of time) to the collectivities they form, how one cannot necessarily guess the nature of the collectivity from the nature of the individuals composing it. That was excellent, I thought. Why not publish that, I thought, and not make us wait so long? 

But then Part 2 also seemed capable of being its own volume, for much the same reasons, and then Part 3 seemed like its own volume, a more satiric one, as did Part 4, a more elegiac and contemplative one, so I was compelled to acknowledge, okay, Mr. Donnelly, I see why you wanted to have all these in the same book.

The long poem that concludes Part 4, “Hymn to Life” (Donnelly notes Lou Andreas Salomé’s poem of the same title, not Longfellow’s, but I suspect Longfellow is in the mix somehow), shows a nice array of his gifts. Much of it is about extinct species, presented in the unscrolling syntax Donnelly has employed to good effect in his earlier books, but it also shows deftness of form in its 6-line stanzas and makes juxtapositions so jaw-dropping, of such different yet still complementary registers, that talk about mere montage or Pound’s ideogrammatic method seems inadequate. The problem of the many (that is, the relationship of the nature of the individual to the nature of the collectivity) reasserts itself, especially its temporal dimension and what it means for the collectivity that individuals die out and disappear.

And the last poem—the very last, coming even after the notes and acknowledgements—somehow does an even more persuasive job of closing the book than “Hymn of Life.”  

So, I hope I am still on the planet for Donnelly’s fourth book.