The Problem of the Many
Published on 17. September 2020
80 pages
978-1-5290-4125-5 (ISBN)
Description
'The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work aEUR" the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do' aEUR" Nick Laird
John Ashbery called Timothy DonnellyaEUR (TM)s previous collection, The Cloud Corporation, aEUR?The poetry of the future, here todayaEUR (TM). The Problem of the Many sees Donnelly, one of the most influential poets of his generation, focused less on the future than the end of history: these richly textured and intellectually capacious poems often seem to attempt nothing less than a circumscription of the totality of human experience. The book contains the already widely praised aEUR?Hymn to LifeaEUR (TM), which opens with a litany of what we have made extinct; elsewhere, from an immediately contemporary vantage, Donnelly confronts the clutter and devastation that civilization has left us as he strives towards a beauty that we still need, along the way enlisting agents as various as Prometheus, Jonah, FlaminaEUR (TM) Hot Cheetos, NyQuil, Nietzsche, and Alexander the Great.
The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate aEUR" a cloud, a crowd aEUR" which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. DonnellyaEUR (TM)s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.
John Ashbery called Timothy DonnellyaEUR (TM)s previous collection, The Cloud Corporation, aEUR?The poetry of the future, here todayaEUR (TM). The Problem of the Many sees Donnelly, one of the most influential poets of his generation, focused less on the future than the end of history: these richly textured and intellectually capacious poems often seem to attempt nothing less than a circumscription of the totality of human experience. The book contains the already widely praised aEUR?Hymn to LifeaEUR (TM), which opens with a litany of what we have made extinct; elsewhere, from an immediately contemporary vantage, Donnelly confronts the clutter and devastation that civilization has left us as he strives towards a beauty that we still need, along the way enlisting agents as various as Prometheus, Jonah, FlaminaEUR (TM) Hot Cheetos, NyQuil, Nietzsche, and Alexander the Great.
The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate aEUR" a cloud, a crowd aEUR" which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. DonnellyaEUR (TM)s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.
Reviews / Votes
The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work - the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do -- Nick Laird Omnivorous, fast-forward, bull-in-a-china-shop poems that deliver more beauty per minute than can comfortably be withstood. If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many bills, and a stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he would have written these poems. * New Yorker * Donnelly is a poet everyone should read. * Guardian * Dramatic tension, humor, lyrical profundity. This is an utterly ingenious and proudly inclusive voice . . .a sensibility so urgent we find ourselves momentarily re-inventing the term Poet. -- Carol Muske-Dukes * Huffington Post * A Stevens of the Anthropocene -- Douglas Crase * Artforum *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pan Macmillan
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
File size
1,14 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-5290-4125-5 (9781529041255)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many; The Cloud Corporation, which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. He is a recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
