The Problem of the Many by Timothy Donnelly. Wave Books, 2019. 208 pp. $20.00 (paperback)

Ours is, inarguably, a time of great catastrophe: environmentally, politically, socially, financially, and spiritually. We are living in the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction of species as a result of human activity: our oceans are clogged with oil and harmful acid levels; our ozone, which filters UV rays, is depleted; the earth can no longer bear the assault of fracking for gas and oil used to fuel machines, nor mined coal extraction; carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, soil erosion, and agriculture reached a record high in 2019, of 37 billion tons; and our industrialized food production methods now utilize genetic modification and factory farming to feed the world’s 7.8 billion people (72 billion land animals and 1.2 trillion aquatic animals are killed annually for human consumption), though as one in ten of the world’s global population in developing countries are dying from malnutrition, it’s clear that the ruined land, bloated crops, and slaughtered animals are not in fact feeding “everyone”: mostly just the 1st and 2nd world citizens who can afford to eat. And many of those do not just eat to live, they live to eat—42% of Americans as of 2020 are clinically obese, as measured, however crudely, by body mass index (a person’s weight divided by the square of their height).

Statistics, however, are inimical to poetry, though their desensitizing effect on the postmodern lyric sensibility are a framing principle in Donnelly’s third collection The Problem of the Many (2019), a 198-page opus (including a coda, “The Human,” after the acknowledgements page), and preceded by The Cloud Corporation (2010) and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (2003). In his poem “All Through the War,” Donnelly’s speaker flows fluidly between themes in his characteristically labyrinthian way, including chemical toxicity, attempts to heal his body with herbal supplements, his father’s surgery, his back-to-the-future forays into nature (“I pulled a lichen from/ the bronze age megalith with the intent to burn it back home”), and a Syrian red pepper and walnut dip he concocts, all taking place in Persephone’s underworld, or rather, a real world in which she is absent or refuses to return. But interspersed between these personal and mythological references are anecdotal statistics: drone and airstrikes, the starvation of Yemini children, Trump’s cavorting with the Saudi crown prince, and war-related violence in Libya killing 47 civilians, woven into the poem’s silken fabric as if incidentally: a distraught international global network inextricably yoked to the poem’s local and domestic particulars.

I preface my reading with these global statistics only to provide a backdrop for Donnelly’s work, which takes seriously the very meaning of the word “catastrophe,” from the mid-16th century Latin catastrophe (denouement), and the Greek katastrophē (overturning, or sudden turn). A “strophe” is Greek for stanza, and the word’s etymological roots in “denouement” and “sudden turn” are also poetic, evoking the aesthetic question of lyric closure (open, closed, metrical, epiphanic), and also the lyric’s agricultural roots: a line’s break or enjambment as coextensive with the turning of the plow. The Latin word versus means “against, turned,” and from the Roman Empire (Ovid) through Modern English (Spenser) to contemporary poetry (A.R. Ammons), various poets have since taken up agricultural metaphors to describe Orpheus’ death, the perambulations of flânerie, or the fraught perils, as Heather McHugh writes about Thomas Wyatt’s poem “They fle from me,” of turning from a beloved whom herself has turned away.

This “turning” has gradually shifted from pre-industrial and pastoral metaphors to those heralding an epoch of war and chaos, as in the opening lines of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” composed in 1919, a year after the end of World War 1: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Yet in Yeats’ poem, as well as Donnelly’s work, turning has come to indicate not a relationship between farmer and land, nor the movements of a human figure or figures on or off the page, but a geospatial and lexical turning representative of our groundlessness and placelessness in the world. For Yeats, this “turning” was vortical, in a gyre (oceanic or planetary), a movement of implosion, not explosion: a center that cannot hold.

Donnelly, however, is writing in the 21st century, wherein biopolitics and geopolitics have come to replace other forms of political ideology (communism, socialism, democracy, or our current reign of oligarchic capitalism—one can’t really call fascism or neo-fascism an “ideology,” as it’s more a reign of hell). And for Donnelly, this de-situatedness and disembodiedness is no less pronounced as it was for Yeats or other 19th and 20th century biopolitical thinkers, including John of Salisbury, who coined the term “body politic” in the Middle Ages, Rudolf Kjellén, coining biopolitics and geopolitics in 1905, Morley Roberts’ 1938 world model, which he defined as a “loose association of cell and protozoa colonies,” or Foucault’s mid-century “biopower.”

And as Franco Berardi writes in his book The Uprising, which explains how digital finance gave way to “semiocapitalism,” a form of meta-simulacra by which capital itself is signified: “The revelation of the century is the devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism: abstraction of work from activity, goods from usefulness, time from sensuousness . . . Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic body.” And while many critics and poets often positively associate abstraction with the mind’s free reign, others are more skeptical of its inflationary powers, as a metaphor for money. As Ben Lerner says in The Hatred of Poetry: “The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.” Berardi adapts William Carlos Williams’ maxim “no ideas but in things” to financial capital, declaring matter the matrix of creation: poetry and capital are “languages of exchangeability,” which if therein grounded would signal the return of an infinite hermeneutics, a hidden resource of surplus value or excess of transactional “parole” that could make paradigm shifts possible.

Donnelly, who leads the vanguard of post-lyric, post-Romantic, and neo-formalist poetry, has throughout his entire oeuvre been concerned if not obsessed with how to mark (metrically, temporally, and semantically), this very sense of neoliberal displacement: collapsed globalized borders, a world and body sans frontières, virtual money and markets whizzing at a pace we can no longer notate, let alone comprehend. The metaphors Donnelly uses to describe the rivaling pulls of inside and outside, as well as terrain, sky, and sea, vary: in his second book, which largely takes place in an etherized dream and mindscape, amid a corporation of clouds, it’s vertigo; and in his third book, the feeling described is more engulfment, or swallowing). From his third book’s shortest poem, “Jonah”: “If I don’t speak to/ the darkness it/ swallows me.”

He mentions “engulfment” specifically as well, in “Lapis Lazuli,” an exploration of metaphor as tenor (the concept, object, or person meant) and vehicle (the image that carries the weight of the comparison), figuring himself as the metaphoric tenor:

“…a vehicle
is no one single
part of itself, it isn’t

even the sum
of its parts, it’s how
its parts relate and how
this fits
the common idea of
what a vehicle is
meant to be and do.

I wake to find I am
engulfed
entirely in blue…”

These alternating ways of situating the coordinates of his somatic body and subjectivity within drastically compromised textual, global, and cosmic landscapes speak to the linguistic and poetic principle of deixis: words and phrases that can’t be understood apart from their contexts, whose semantic meaning is fixed, but denoted meaning time- or place-dependent, as in pronouns (indexical signs that point to their contextual occurrence). Deictic speakers locate themselves in spacetime, and with respect to things, events, and each other, in order to exist, discursively: to not be deictic, in oral communication, is literally not to “be” in a situation. Authors, however, can “be,” propositionally, “nowhere,” or in many decontextualized places at once, and literary attempts to escape our contexts is one way we can take flight from historical and biological facts and the weight of our bodies. Though as any poet knows, we soon find ourselves in yet another tangled web: what Frederic Jameson called “the prison house of language.” Donnelly finds ways out of these entrapments with an acrobatic brio paralleled only by the literary heir with whom he wrestles and amends most frequently, modernist giant Wallace Stevens, who wrote: “Life is not people and scene, but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself.”

Like Stevens, Donnelly offers his own defense of l’art pour l’art through the “supreme fiction” of the creationist lyric “I,” with a rivaling statement of poetics in “After Callimachus”: “I know you don’t ordinarily / trust rhetoric . . . but I see / you have already taken my word for it,” the speaker says, and, at the poem’s close, “I feel the only way to make life bearable is to make it.” And, in his defiant “The Death of Truth”: “Art lies all the time, and look: nothing happens.”

Any poem whose ends justify its means, regardless of a poet’s role or responsibility to society, is exactly what Plato distrusted about poetry, accusing it of being an “imitative imitation” of ideal forms and truth (an art form representing the world as it appears to our senses), and Homer, of enthralling his audiences by inflaming their passions and inciting their baser natures. Both downfalls, thought Plato, weaken the good/evil distinction and thus foundation of the state.

Donnelly’s artful mastery of disguise and ventriloquism (in “Gifted,” he describes his breath as a “recording device” buried within a plush white bear presented to an inhuman child who tears the bear apart in a “victory against the sun”), would make any reader’s head spin, including Plato, and his daemon-like genius is wielded with greatest virtuosity when he becomes ruler of the Tower of Babel. In “Apologies from the Ground Up,” he describes a need to “fill / whatever we perceive to be an emptiness . . . electing ourselves into the very position of authority // we had been happy to find vacant.” With reluctance, no other hands raised, he appoints himself: “Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say? / It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The clipped, workaday syntax of this outrageously funny poetic conceit (“I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm / with rustic beer and talk of history”) furthers its hilarity, yet as with all of his poems, there is an underlying tone of moral seriousness. The speaker describes, prior to his construction of the Tower, a world of “chaos” with a “fondness for images of protodemocracy”: the “fat inner monologues” of fellow passengers seemingly oblivious to the passing of centuries, wherein the objects and landscapes remain static and changeless, without an established king.

Thus, while Donnelly’s imitation games jest at Platonic antimonies, there is, as a kernel of truth hidden within a joke, a deeper significance. Considering America’s nationalist self-concept as a “diverse melting pot” to our current climate of biological warfare, racialized, gendered, and ethnic violence, border patrolling, immigrant detention and deportation, virtue-signaling, and stay-in-your-lane identitarian policing, Donnelly’s Tower of Babel rings uncomfortable true.

But the builder of the Tower of polyvocality is not at peace with his ability to summon spirits: in “All Through the War,” he alternates between paralyzed despair (“some days I just sit back and watch things tear each other / apart”); parental guidance (he says to his daughter on the phone “Be honest, be honest, be honest”); and, in the final tercet, a moving revelation of his inner battle between epistemology and belief: “Some days I know the strongest feeling is grief / but I believe it must be love . . . Some days I feel each cell in my body has its fingers crossed.”

This poem’s final line is this book’s most definitive statement of a hope beyond catastrophe (along with the collection’s antepenultimate, 16-page poem “Hymn to Life”): the book’s affects otherwise swerve between defeatism and its resistance through monologues in a variety of poetic forms, many of which wind, with serpentine, unpunctuated breathlessness for several stanzas.

Mimetic of what Judith Butler describes in Excited Speech: A Politics of the Performative (utterances formed from incitement, excitement, and injury), as well as Baudrillard’s term “hyperacceleration” to describe how labor productivity must now match the rhythm of machines, the historical trauma Donnelly incorporates and inhabits manifests throughout the collection both tropologically and formally, as written from within the hermetic space of the speaker’s mind: a diagnostic of the infosphere’s pollution of the psyche, as it were. And while historical actors abound (Prometheus, Leviathan, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, whom he describes as a “monster”)—a lineage of ancestral behemoths whom he vocally channels—Donnelly also lays claim to canine, aquatic, and metaphysical ontologies. “Malamute,” a poem in sestets beginning with the anaphoric “When I was a dog” begins: “When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs / and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it.” “Malamute” is a representation of shared animal activity from a dog’s perspective, but the speaker, however content he is to run “mile on mile convincingly” with the pack, “the nylon tapes between us / reinforcing sentiment,” is disquieted by a “shape without / sufficient contour” in the forest, which, in the last stanza, is revealed to be a collapse in hive mind: “some trouble to me the others / felt no twitch of, or, if they did, our language failed what / must have been its purpose.”

And in “The Endless” he describes his metamorphic being as a fish, albeit one that is, through simile, divine: “I was a fat white fish / dissolving / under the sold-out stadium sun / like a god / but like a god / I could live through anything.” Except, perhaps, “toxic sips” of saccharine soda, “a can of you in / the 12-pack in my refrigerator.” This poem (“Diet Mountain Dew”) describes his construction of a “ship of death,” “powered up all night like / American Express,” built to sustain anything, while “preparing for / the journey to bloviation”: but it’s also a poem wherein he confesses he “falls” for the con of advertising’s false appearances, vis-à-vis Mr. Clean’s garish green disinfectant, or an “extra-terrestrial lizard,” as “further evidence / of my humanity.”

So his ship of death (and perhaps, his Babylonian tower), as he says in this poem’s final lines, was built not from thanatos (the Greek god of nonviolent deaths, as opposed to eros), but so as to “emerge from the other / end of it intact, and perfectly/ prepared to be your grasshopper.” The speaker’s Ovidian shapeshifting is thus as mercurial as it is protean, in his command of the constitutive forms, from protozoa to god, it purports to occupy as a kaleidoscope voice: but also, as these poems suggest, being a mouthpiece in a human body renders him mortal and vulnerable.

Donnelly’s own vantage point as bard, “thinking / myself apart from all the others,” not in the sense of “above,” but “away from,” he says (or at least seeing what many don’t, in “Malamute”), may factor into his collection’s gnomic title, The Problem of the Many. Is the poet one of the many, or a voice, however subjective, for the collective? Whether alluding to overpopulation, the dangers of ecofascism (which in its extreme form links environmentalism to xenophobic genocide, and deep ecology to white supremacy, using the earth’s survival as a justification for ridding it of those who pollute it), or Trumptopian populism, its multiple valences are profound, and what’s best of all, the book itself far evades any airtight summation: Donnelly delights in confounding his reader, pointing left while we’re looking right, and flouting conventionalism.

True to form, he favors catachresis (a semantic misuse, or word that departs from conventional usage), as a literary device: “I have come to love catachresis because what’s wrong with it is / right: I light my heart with so much emptiness there’s room / here in the dark for everything.” Yet, all three of Donnelly’s books are shot through, not just with dexterous hijinks, but a remembrance of sentiment and sensation, the living pulse of being in harmony with one’s environment and natural surroundings, and real or conjured companions. In his first book, the poem “His Long Imprison’d Thought” begins with an act of genuine, imaginative sympathy: “The crow cries because hunger is no lovesome way to feel,” and also includes the memorable “The terror I inspired I am made to feel.” In his second, more despondently, he states: “the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.” Yet in The Problem of the Many, we witness a tonal shift from the first book in particular and also the second to a degree, from an ecstatic, libertine exuberance and a sincere, if rogue, devotion, to a more brooding or feigned display of feeling.

This transition could be seen as a function of our times, as affect theory (defined by founder Silvan Tomkins as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us”), with its mechanized buffet offerings of “cute, zany, interesting” and “stumplimity’s” turpitude, have replaced what Spinoza called “active joy” or Julia Kristeva, in Black Sun, “melancholia,” but it’s worth mentioning, as Donnelly’s emotional and empathic range, and his ability to express it poetically, are as formidable as his other gifts of sardonic wit, irony, intellectual giantism, and telescopic magnification and atomization of his subject matter.

From “Lycopodium Obscurum”: “If it’s true that a person has to become more than half- /dead to this world to live in it happily, then I’ll be happy / never to live in it happily again.” And, in “Wasted”:

“…I walk with a printout of my life’s lost money
into the haze and down to where the water is, sort of

tearful at first to look over time and the sadness doled out
in foolish amounts, which do, as they say, add up, but

it means nothing here, meant nothing all along: I see
life clearly for once, and am just as over it as I ever was.”

As a last instance, in “The Death of Truth” (titled borrowed from Michiko Kakutani’s 2018 The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump), a companion poem to two others in a suite, “The Death of Print Culture,” and “The Death of the Author,” he invokes Walt Whitman, the father of American verse and self-proclamation of the lyric “I,” but Whitman’s “body electric” has been replaced by mac and cheese: “I sing  // the body mac and cheese, deep-fried: Tom Jefferson’s / personal recipe.” The speaker then describes himself as food:

“… Handsomest Cobb salad of them all.
Ty Cobb himself told me so. Roseanne is my witness.
A very nice letter. I haven’t opened it. A good call

with no obstruction whatsoever. Legs like a gymnast
from here to Venus. Should put the best possible spin on it.
If it’s organized, it isn’t crime anymore, it’s business….”

Those two stanzas (recalling the words of Michael Corleone in The Godfather: “It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business”) are difficult to parse, but he seems to be invoking deregulated commerce (literary and industrial) with “no obstruction whatsoever.”

Donnelly references feminine personages in a few other poems, including Elizabeth I, yet his passage on Helen of Troy in the title poem is particularly moving:

“Some say Helen wasn’t abducted. Some say she didn’t resist or cry

tears remembered in yellow flowers. Its freshly harvested seeds
smell like frankincense…
Some say she stood in a field of them, waiting….
…Many say
she doesn’t exist. She is daughter of Zeus, half sister to Alexander.
It can’t behold the infinite inside itself. It will only see one cloud.”

Most gripping about this passage on the mythical Helen is the speaker’s pronominal shift from the “she” of the allegedly abducted Helen, harkening back to his earlier mention of Persephone, to an “it”: it, in reference not to Helen, but the yellow flowers wherein she wept. While Donnelly’s aesthetic is baroque, his diction is scrupulously chosen: the shift from “she” to a dummy subject, an ambient, empty “it,” further underscores the drama of loss and compensation for which a ghostly female subject often stands as a Derridean hauntology or trace, a delicate undercurrent of felt pathos throughout the book.

The following lines in “All Through the War,” further dilate this broken fissure of sad longing: “I thought I could cry for my friend no further until I opened / her armoire to lay to rest her scented shirts in an appliance box: // white, off-white, shell pink, true pink, lilac, lavender, blue.”

These aporetic passages, wherein Donnelly affirms Helen’s existence through historical lineage, despite our intellectual opposing of “myth” and “truth,” and expresses his personal grief, are emotional punctums in a collection otherwise more maximal and cerebral, a “go for broke” symphony of soliloquies, choral odes, satellites, gut flora, sassafras, and mutant DNA, unzipped.

Yet Donnelly remains a resolute defender of what remains of the Romantics’ idyllic dreams. While conscient of the artifice of idealized femininity (beauty, goodness, and truth), he creates spaces of poetic deliverance from ecocide: a world without nature’s regenerative force and fertility. “Hymn to Edmond Albius” is a poem about the cultivation of the vanilla bean, at which Europeans notoriously failed: “They could get the vine / to flower, but in the absence of ancestral pollinators, specifically / hummingbirds and a stingless bee, the flowers dropped off podless.”

Albius, born into slavery on Bourbon island east of Madagascar, Donnelly writes, solved this dilemma in 1841 at age 12 by lifting with a bamboo splint the flap of the rostellum, dividing the pollen-heavy male anther from the female stigma in order to rub the pollen on her wand, and, “Within weeks the pods had begun // to form and lengthen into joyous beanlike squiggles laden with / tiny seeds like secrets of the universe….” Although Albius himself died unrecognized in poverty, the world “…grew rich with vanilla, adding it to candy, Coca-Cola, / Chanel No. 5….”

Thus, a reading of Donnelly’s collection wouldn’t be complete without reference not just to the dizzying array of forms, rhetorical modes, tonal registers, and personae (zoological and godly) his speakers embody, but also literary movements: Romanticism, yes, but preceded by Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne’s decadent, taboo, pre-Raphaelite verses on anti-theism, oceanic time, and death. And modernism, though there are allusions throughout to other periods of lyric history: the Elizabethan canon, as well as the metaphysical and transcendentalist poets—in many poems, Donnelly assumes the guise of an self-exiled Thoreau or a jilted John Donne.

First mentioned in Longinus’ 1st c. AD treatise On the Sublime as a form of elevated language that inspires veneration, the sublime, in the 18th century, and for the British Romantics, morphed from a rhetorical function to that of vision: an aesthetic quality of nature distinct from beauty, specifically nature’s inspiration of terror along with awe, and irregularity and asymmetry, not just harmony. Admixed with Donnelly’s Byronic satire and anticlimactic bathos is a New York School aesthetic, as he scales from lofty heights of sublimity, to the quotidian and mundane.

Each of Donnelly’s three books heartrendingly echoes the desire iterated in John Dennis’ Miscellanies, his 1693 account of crossing the Alps, a mountain range spanning eight countries, whose peak, Mont Blanc, at the French-Italian border, is its highest point at 16,000 feet: to find “a delight consistent with reason.” But his third book underscores this desire almost desperately, aforementioned with his vertiginous positioning to space. From his poem “Happiness,” which seeks to find an analogy for metaphor, itself:

“Even if it could be felt
all at once, instead of
in installments, instead of
this staggering
out over a lifetime
of feeling it without
warning, or even
without wanting it, seize

before sliding back
into its opposite, seismic
event…”

While not exactly a “delightful” sensation, Donnelly again reworks his sympathies, alongside O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency,” and Donne’s “Devotions on Emergent Occasions,” written 333 year prior: “the feeling / of how it would feel / likewise would escape me.”

Reading these lines, one feels both the synesthesia described by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, as well as Eliot’s attempts to escape it: “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” recalling theories of Gestalt psychology and art history (how to distinguish a form from its surroundings, or differentiate between figure and ground).

Lastly, on the subject of a poetic mind’s organizing tendencies, Donnelly viscerally articulates his relationship not only to space, but time. “Solvitur Ambulando” is a poem ostensibly “about” time, which Einstein proved with his theory of special relativity to be not only relative to human perspective (a watch strapped to your ankle falls behind one on your wrist: your head ages more quickly than your feet), and cosmic perspective (atomic clocks tick slower in space than earth), but to spacetime itself, represented as a continuum or manifold. Donnelly juxtaposes spacetime with Newtonian physics, arguing that “in time’s smallest unit, / no motion can take place,” and

“…insofar as

any length of time is composed of a finite
number of such smallest units
     during which, by definition, no motion
          can take place, it follows that no motion
can take place in any aggregate of these
     units either…”

Zeno’s flying arrow, Donnelly concludes, is motionless, for as Zeno stated, in any one instant of time, the arrow is stilled: it cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; nor can it move to where it is, as it’s already there.

This paradox is founded on the idea that time is composed of instants, however, two-dimensional and linear (moving only forward or back): an inertial frame of reference inimical to that of the earth, which rotates on its axis and orbits around the sun. And Henri Bergson, who introduced the concept of time’s duration (la durée)—which Zeno’s paradox omits—was the first to include consciousness in his temporal paradigm, which he saw as mobile and incomplete, not static: he considered time to be measured not by mathematical “instants,” but immeasurable “moments.” The lack of any temporal sequencing can spell disaster, as Dickinson alluded to in her poem “I felt a cleaving in my mind,” describing madness as thoughts unraveled: “balls on the floor.”

Duration, Bergson concluded, is ineffable, and can only be represented indirectly though images and intuition. For poets, memory and the imagination are the tools used to defy the materialist notion that we are no more than our bodies or matter, a way to create a retrospective of our own remembered lives (Wordsworth’s definition of poetry’s origins as “emotion recollected in tranquility”); to juxtapose the past with the present, in order to change, evolve, or modify our behavior and beliefs; and also to imagine possible futures beyond our entropic present times.

Donnelly, too, recognizes that the laws governing an object’s states of inertia and acceleration and the existentialist death of futurity need amending, speaking to “the need to commit to a new / kind of take on what it means to be / composed, and of how the properties / of the collective won’t by necessity reflect those / of its constituents.” Referring again to his collection’s title, he frames it as a problem not just of the “many,” but the individual: though “no atom in my brain” wants to walk outside to see the stars, he says, “together, / they still want to, and it feels miraculous.”

But the miraculous vibrancy of life is in parts described as being repurposed and reduced to fast food, as a telling reflection of our consumerist epoch. Along with the artificial soda he imbibes, gustatory pleasures abound (falafel, burgers, sandwiches, and the poem “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos”: “the stain” on his hands, in eating them, becoming the “blazon of his house”). While mentioning the salutary effects of non-processed foods, “ideal for the absorption / of such nutrients as folic acid, niacin, potassium, and lycopene”; metabolism, acids, and other cellular and organic processes; and corn, canola, alfalfa, soy, and wheat (our nation’s high-yield crops), the speaker’s stance on “living to eat” is clear: “After so many failed strivings / into darkness, into ether, they’ve come to value most / what they can lay their hands on, place inside their mouths.” From “After Callimachus”:

“For a purpose I hope to grow clearer in the future
     tomorrow I’ll consume
          a Fritos Taco Grande BeltBuster
     at the Dairy Queen down the road from where I am….”

This is followed by a passage invoking Nietzsche, Apollo, Poseidon, juxtaposed with migratory monarch butterflies’ extinction, explaining how the panoramic display of supermarket food allows stars to “appear more precisely themselves” against the night, like “canisters of Pringles.” Figurative and literal meanings of “consumption” collide, and touch upon the poem’s broader historical context (Catherine Paul described the 20th century as a “process of digestion”); in the meantime, the speaker consents, with conscious irony, to share in this rite of our amnesiac times.

“Looking back, I remember the BeltBuster,
     and fondly, as comprising
          two meat patties, two cheese slices,
seasoned taco meat, Fritos, and possibly more cheese
     in a more liquid form, like a queso sauce
or its approximation, served
          on a fairly straightforward bun…and I ate

with my hands what remained
     of its meat, which by that point had grown
          inseparable from the cheese,
because, as a rule of thumb, if a higher life form
     dies for my meal, I do what I can….”

Cannibalism is thought by many social theorists to itself be a metaphor for capitalism’s depravity, mirroring the inner logic of unleashed appetites without limits or laws. As Roger Ebert wrote about Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover: “[The movie] is about the greed of an entrepreneurial class that takes over perfectly efficient companies and steals their assets, that marches roughshod over timid laws in pursuit of its own aggrandizement, that rapes the environment, that enforces its tyranny on the majority.”

The bodily consumption of the feared, or “foreign” other is a byproduct of commodity culture, whereby difference is reappropriated and reassimilated into dominant, master narratives, or “consumed” by anyone with purchasing power: celebrity auctions, poachers, safari tourists, and contemporary art buyers all seek ravenously to obtain, in an “everything’s for sale” market, a “piece of the real” and its auratic authenticity. The moral of the story is, according to Donnelly: “Don’t give anything away.” And what you can’t get, “disvalue loudly in public,” as it’s “not worth anything, like safety pins,” and “Only losers need those,” like a “blue cartoon do-nothing donkey.” One senses that in these darker poems, it is not the speaker who is nihilistic: he is vocally satirizing, with his prowess for channeling voices, the ruthlessness of capitalist greed.

In fact, Donnelly’s three collections compose a trilogy devoted to “reality hunger” (the whole of it, not just its fetishized parts), a chase described in The Cloud Corporation as “sick persistence”: this puts him in the esteemed company of Cervantes, and one senses the speaker would never confuse his impassioned pursuit and hunger for the real with low-hanging fruit along the way.

The subject of consumption also speaks to the book’s epigraph: “I will not eat my heart alone” (a line from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam), which recalls the last section of George Herbert’s poem “Love (III),” wherein the speaker is invited to dwell with love, and initially refuses, until the end: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.”

“Love is not love when it insists on comprehending itself,” Donnelly writes in “Prometheus”: but might that not be a salvo, challenge, or riposte—to see deeply into one’s human fallibility and that of others, and emerge stronger, with a tested, weary, albeit disillusioned love, all the more powerful for being given by choice, not evolutionary instinct or so-called design?

And might not the cleared field for the reader include, as he writes in “His Future as Atilla the Hun,” a “meadow, vast, and in it, grazing / on buttercups, an errant heifer with a wounded foot, / its bloody hoofprints followed by a curious shepherd back / to something sharp in the grass”?

The sharp object, he says, is “the point of a long sword,” (a pen, not a weapon of war), given to the poet as “a gift, a task”: an instrument akin to an Orphic lyre, and signifying, for Donnelly, a means through which to lay “waste to the empire” now laid at his feet. Whether this empire is seen as an imperialist wasteland in need of toppling, or constitutive of the multitudinous earthly forms and appearances he conjures, it makes sense that it would first have to be decreated. The “aboutness” of Donnelly’s work is as elusive as the aboutness of poetry itself—breath, language, witnessing, naming, and holding space for self, other, and world—the very “point” of existence, in its indescribable totality. In Donnelly’s third triumphant collection, he celebrates the will-to-live of things as they are independent of human observation, with renewed rhapsodic powers. “I don’t want words to sever me from reality,” wrote Henri Cole: look no further than this book.