Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

Timothy Donnelly

There are millions of poets in America for whom Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit should be required reading. Specifically, the slam poets, the performance poets, and those on the opposite end of the spectrum who haven't yet figured out that rhythm is still an essential component of free verse.

Richard Howard, in his brief but effusive introduction to the book, seems focused on the fact that most of the poems in this book are not, to the unschooled eye, really about much of anything: "I am perfectly well aware," Howard opines, "that the first (and probably last) question that will be asked is 'What's it all about-- what's he saying?'" As I have said repeatedly, folks, if that's the first question you ask when you read a poem, go to whatever school taught you poetry and demand a refund. It's the wrong question by a mile. The first thing you should be asking yourself after reading a poem is "how does it sound?"

In the case of Timothy Donnelly, the answer is, for every one of these poems, "fantastic." Donnelly may be a young poet publishing his first (as far as I can tell, anyway) book, but he's obviously already paid his poetic dues. He is a master of aggressively free verse, but free verse which uses with a surgeon's precision both rhythm and internal rhyme. This is poetry that is truly a joy to read aloud.

"See before him compost, a mound of it, the moist
rot monitored with heart. He makes a final tulip-hole
by hand, without a tool, and lays a bulb to rest.
(The cultivar: Attila.) A little blood, a little bone, a little
ritual accomplished heavingly and fast, the last
he'll know of company till March-- maybe even April.
In the meantime: the basement. Dusty, misdefined.
Reading? He will read..."
(--"Pansies Under Monkshood: A Folly")

Easily one of the best books to cross my desk this year. Know the name of Timothy Donnelly. Read him. He is a man whose work will be around far into the future.