Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

by Timothy Donnelly

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.

Genres: Poetry

97 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2003

About the author

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010) and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003). His work has been translated into German and Italian and has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and Poet, Poems, Poetry edited by Helen Vendler. A graduate of Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Princeton Universities, he is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

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Reviews

[Corin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

This is perhaps the best poetry collection I’ve read this year. Can’t believe I put off reading TimothyDonnelly for years. Every page, every line, struck a chord. I kept quoting entire stanzas. I guess I read it at the right place at the right time. (Eine Lebenszeit is German for “a lifetime”) 📚🖊👓✨

“There is no enough, and I want
what is not. Which way should I walk
now I know how I will never be?”
—from “It is Better Of Course to Know Useless Things Than to Know Nothing (Seneca)”

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven, sometimes great.

At its best this is innovative and brilliant poetry. Most of the poems are good, but there is too much rambling and individual poems sometimes go on and on. There is a feeling that with more control and editing that this could have been even better.

[Rodney Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this is like riding a porpoise!, Good indeed choice of words, often bouncing around signifying, well signifying!

[Craig Morgan Teicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think there's any debate about how much ass this book kicks...

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, it's a great book. So many wonderful, whimsical poems are found here. I was reminded of Anthony Madrid's I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY while reading, which is one of my favorite books of all time. My only issue with some of the poems is that they seemed to do too much (e.g. "Fanny Fowler's Poetry and Dioramas Workshop"). A few poems are loud, bossy, and can drag you in many different directions simultaneously. I felt a bit dumb or at least tired while reading those ones.

Nevertheless, I recommend the book. Here are some favorite lines:

-"Be mindful; mind my honey do's and don'ts. / I have known ten dishes even honey taints" (25).
-"Forecast: Deepest plum, / Producing chance of infinity in a little room // Streaked with Mexico" (26).
-"The glass knob turns // and now the door open. / Leave your last room. / Leave to find such a beautifuller one" (28).
-"The terror I inspired I am made to feel" (39).
-"I will not give in. I will grow more strange" (42).
-"I would like being a bird, just not a raptor, except perhaps / an owl" (44).
-"how incomprehensible // being has been to me / from the beginning" (45)
-"You approach me for an answer. I hand you / what you want. You have been given another life" (57).
-"Buttercups / collect like cast-off thoughts about the border. I ask // for one last glass of lemonade, and I feel his boyhood hand / clutching a broken pencil, dissolving in salt water" (59).
-"I have become / a person. That's supposed to make it hard to hurt me" (68).
-"you have the next-longest resume in panic Darling / I would be depriving you of everything / you have left if ever I failed to acknowledge that" (73).
-"over a guardrail printed in car-crash" (87)
-"The sun of course / lacks all opinion" (90).
-"An inkling sparks / half the congregation when you rub it right, // half the congregation when you rub it wrong. / I am song forever. I will not have sung" (93).