The Elegance of Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation

I’ve been reading Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation over the last couple weeks. What strikes me first about his work is its elegance. It’s a Wallace Stevens sort of elegance, an elegance and eloquence that is apparent both in its rhetoric and image. And in that, there’s a distance that is marked off from the subject that brings the poems again and again closer to the idea than the thing . . . the theory that lays itself over reality. It’s captivating, as thinking of, as Tony Hoagland calls it, the “skittery” poems of our time, these poems appear as, well, not skittery, even as they enact the sort of roaming mindset that one would think would manifest as skittery. It’s not a book to rush through. And, happily, I still have a section to go. It still gets to be new for a while. Nice. Here’s an example:



Timothy Donnelly
CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A LOTUS


The comparison only went so far: the suffering
from which we had come to expect so much
remained mere suffering; the swamp due south

to which we had thought to compare it in our youth
stayed water choked in excess life, its voices
thoughtlessly forcing the same plump syllables

across the distance into windows furred with night.
But here in the room where we sit thinking that
if suffering had to enter our house, it should have

been the kind that sang, or else the kind from which
small shapes would zoom and circle the light
hanging in the middle of the room like a thought

whose fifteen petals open and whose opening we become
custodian to, here in the lotus of half-sleep, I am
beginning to forget where a comparison falls short.